Beautiful Rearranging

How I Found the Best Seats In the House

Jean and I had a great time on the road. Life out of the spotlight is its own kind of treasure.

There’s nothing quite like going to a political fundraiser with a seven year old.  Sprite, her special occasion drink, snacks, name tags, a house with all the furniture moved out for sliding in socks until people arrive—all of this THRILLS.  Jean rehearses at length for shaking hands with the governor.  “Very nice to meet you, Governor Cooper. I’m JEAN.” She practically curtsies.

Is Jean bored for the stump speeches? Oh no. She sits on the floor, down front in her socks, clapping, nodding emphatically, racing back and forth to the catering trays. She is audibly shocked to hear that arming teachers with guns has been floated by potential NC officials.  She is the only child present. The Governor points to her, something along the lines of I thought I liked Tift but then I met Jean.  

           “Jean is really special,” the Governor smiles.  

“You’re special too,” comes the earnest reply.  The room erupts in laughter; Jean really means it. I ask her often about whether she’s lonely or feels different, mostly predicated on my own bruises from making my own path. Jean doesn’t seem to feel any shade of isolated. EVERYONE is different, she tells me. Why did you feel different, Mom? Because you’re so short?

Jean helps with load out and then hugs EVERYONE, thanking them for their service — the photographer, the caterer, the elected officials, the friends refilling her Sprite who let her eat too many cookies. 

“The speakers were really interesting, Mom.”  We are on the way home, driving in the dark.  

           “I’m not showing you too much?”

“No.”

We discuss kindness, Donald Trump, and how inspiring it is to see people dedicated to making the world a better place one step at a time.

           “There’s never been a woman president, Jean.”

            “Yes, there has, Mom,” she shakes her head. 

             “No.  No there hasn’t.”

             “What!!??  That can’t be true.”

             “It’s true.”

              The news completely shocks her into silence. “I’m going to have to do something about that when I grow up.”  Her little sneakers swing as the car turns, a mess of double knots. 

  Like everybody else I know, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, worried about the world, about myself, about how I’m the mother of a big kid, not a small one, about what I might be getting wrong.  I’ve been worried about what I’m not doing.  I’ve been worried about what I am doing.  I’ve been thinking about how to use my work in service to my community, as an antidote to the extractive quality of touring, as a grounding in a messy, loud, important year.  I’ve needed strategies to stay positive, stave off overwhelm, anxiety and apathy.  I picture Joan Baez in Selma.  How did that circle of people stay centered in peace and invent new ways forward?  How can I stay energized and show up for my home state?  What can musicians learn from community organizers ?  It's not easy to sleep these days;  I use some of the extra time awake to plan activities to not get distracted and work in the right direction.  

Another reason I’ve been not sleeping is that I was gearing up to make a record — warming up every day, pretending to have a meditation practice, getting ready like an athlete.  A handful of weeks out from the session, we had to call it off.  Not permanently, not forever, but for a minute and unexpectedly.  After five years of working on a project, it was disappointing.  But I haven’t even cried about it because I’m that seasoned of a veteran at this point; stuff happens.  The release of having made something is delayed.  Whatever the lesson of this present moment, limbo is not something Capricorns like me are particularly good at.  Frankly, I was hoping to make sense of lots of life by making a new record; suddenly purpose is gone.  Which isn’t to say I’m not going to make a record, it’s just not as soon as I thought. 

I feel gingerly through the limbo; it’s a house at night with rearranged furniture, reminding me how many of my projects in my office are incomplete, in part because I’ve been working on a different scale.  For almost five years, I’ve been trying to renovate an old motel in my hometown.  We’ve been pandemic-ed and bank crisis-ed and we are gonna make it.  But the boarded up building peels paint in the meantime.

“Mom, what does abandoned mean?”

“Abandoned means a building where nobody goes that’s probably falling down some.”

“Oh, like the motel.”

“Do you think it’s gonna happen, Jean?” 

She shrugs.  “It’s basically been my whole life,”  Jean told me.  

       “Just since you were two.” I correct her.  

It’s a similar feeling through the dark to tell you what I’ve been doing in the years since Jean was two, when I decided to stop touring.  Larger projects like the hotel, longer term archival research projects, interdisciplinary circles, collecting objects as entry points for songs, political advocacy and always, always, always following questions.  Do I know what I’m doing?  Absolutely not. But I like it, even without outcomes to show you. 

With an amazing team at Duke University, where I am a Practitioner in Residence, I research Rosetta Records, a jazz label dedicated to the foremothers of jazz and blues, run by an avant-garde-bookstore-owning, feisty, unique single mother dedicated to consciousness raising circles and women’s rights.  My research questions began at how do we care for the women in this archive?  Do we upload them to Spotify where they will be underpaid, decontextualized and assumed by AI? What can I learn from this bohemian New Yorker?  Now I’m somewhere early mid-stream, sitting on a hunch about systems.  Haven’t technological advances allowed new forms of distribution in music to lock the same people out over and over again?  Why am I so familiar with the tone the 78 collectors use in letters to Rosetta, insisting a man with a guitar is the blues but a woman in a dress is only vaudeville.  What does this time capsule have to say about where we are today? 

And what the heck does my own story have to do with any of this?  I’m not sure how to talk about the music business or my place in it except that dipping my toe back in brings a flood of memories like the record executive who always insisted I was thinking too much and I should stop that.   All the van rides and cheap motels — half of them before iPhones — were a wonderful and strange way of life.  For all the soulful friends I’ve made on the road making music,  there’s also the world of consumption that really believes its own hype, and plenty of shallow transactions.  Tech is the latest gatekeeper, social media the cafeteria, and I’m old enough to have been taught, deeply, that centering myself is not cool and humble bragging doesn’t excuse it.   

       In the sleepless, in the limbo, in the strange energy of this year, in the rearranging of plans, in gathering myself to go back to a world full of judgement and commodity, as it crosses my mind to just forget about that, I unearth a new prized possession.  My time away from the music business has been a wonderful chapter, unexpectedly precious to me.  Like a buried treasure I didn’t know I had in my pocket.  When I first looked at that 20 month old bald head and said this is the last tour, I felt like I had failed everybody.  I thought my musical path and my creative life would be lost to me.   Whatever is ahead, I love my deeply rooted, deeply quiet, deeply normal life in my community.  These past five years offstage have been my finest act.

Another record won’t change the world.  It probably won’t even change my world.  For decades, I told myself this next corner up ahead is gonna make everything make sense!  We’ll give raises and have more studio days and a guitar tech!  Obama was president and the world didn’t seem quite so on fire, even though it probably was.  The time when I would take up any challenge to keep a band together is gone.  What I will never give up on, though, is how music can open my heart in ways that never stop surprising me.  

Jean and I eat hamburgers at our favorite old-fashioned joint, stop into my favorite wine shop.  Nina Simone is on the radio. Her song moves through me in a way that I have not experienced music in a long time.  As if it has nothing to do with me.  As if music is not a part of me, not something I participate in.  I just listen.  There is no thinking about who is playing or how the voice moves through the throat to make a sound so rich.  No search for how the lyrics work.

Jean interrupts this daydream.  “Mom, did they have hamburgers when you were a little girl?”

“Yes, of course they did.  How old do you think I am?”

“So when were hamburgers invented?”

“You’ll have to ask your grandfather that,” I tell her, shaking my head.

Limbo is gone.  In the bright little wine shop, I am right where I am supposed to be.  Being the audience is amazing.  Being the audience for somebody like Nina Simone,  for someone like Jean, for my little street, our beloved friends who wave to us from close and far.  What amazing good fortune — to be in the audience for this big, bright, messy miracle of a crazy world.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  You couldn’t pry it from my hands.

          Maybe I’ll be singing again soon. But until then, I’m taking it all in from the seats down front.