TRIGGER WARNING: these songs are really intense for me, that doesn't mean they will be for you, but I don't know. If you don't feel like you are prepared to hear me sing about trauma and sad stuff, maybe listen to this later.

Katrina was in town and I asked them to design a tattoo for me, we sat on the porch with coffee and accordions and they filled pages with little things they thought might be significant to me. I fell in love with a bird carrying a human heart in it's talons, it carried this sense of desperation I related to, a freedom weighted down with pain. Katrina read out loud to me this quote from the essay they were reading, The Laugh of the Medusa by Helene Cixous

"Flying is woman's gesture-flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of fly- ing and its numerous techniques; for centuries we've been able to possess anything only by flying; we've lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers. It's no accident that voler has a double meaning, that it plays on each of them and thus throws off the agents of sense. It's no accident: women take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They (illes)" go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down."

I laughed because it was exactly what I loved about the bird they had drawn me and I tattooed the world "voler" above the birds wing. That's what this is about, stealing and flying. This is me reclaiming my words, my experiences, my body, stealing them back at my desk at 5 in the morning. Taking what I wanted and what I didn't and soaring off with it.

So here are some songs I've written over the course of the past year and a half. I wrote them for myself, to try and be ok. If they can mean something for you, then they can be for you too. I think it's important to clarify that these songs have been part of a process for me, learning how to move forward, escape from ghosts, let the past be a part of me but not destroy me. These songs are me trying to figure out the definitions of words like home and trust. This is the dark magical part of myself that I need to access to stay in motion. I second guess myself a lot and think things like maybe I don't need to write such a long explanation for this small bit of music, but again, this is for me and I like explaining where I'm coming from. I hope this is for you too, but if it isn't that's fine, we all have different experiences and ways of seeing things.

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