Fate of Man Is Sarah's Eyes
From my residency at Montana Artists Refuge
This lime green kitchen with 15-foot ceilings is what I’ve called my office for the past ten days. Basin, Montana is a town of 150 people, one restaurant, one bar, a very extraordinary community of artists, thinkers and bohemians, and a lot of old mining roads if you set out up into the mountains. I’m just home from an impromptu salon at the town pottery studio where I shared what I have been working on here with a handful of sweet new friends gathered in armchairs. Someone brought a cooler of beer; we loitered afterwards talking about work and summer and secret hiking places. Load out was walking guitars about a block through the center of town, over a bridge on a trout stream. Not a car passed. The night is a rare kind of quiet now; no one else seems awake. Water warms on the stove and I watch it without watching it. I’ve maybe probably actually finished writing a record. I hardly know what to do with the thought so I let it pass. I certainly can’t speak it out loud and spook it. Sure, there are a couple stragglers, a few completely new things I’ve just started that might wind up being something, and yes, there always remains the question of what’s missing. But in the dim lamplight, the layers of what I’ve been writing, which began as a found object exhibit almost four years ago, exist as something I can sing, something that makes sense, something that I am quietly proud of, something that came together quickly at this little kitchen table.
I’ll host that little salon here over the next few weeks and share some of these wobbly fawns. The Fate of Man Is Sarah’s Eyes is out of tune and out of time. I don’t get too sucked into perfecting demos. I have a long writing list, so I give myself about an hour to make a demo and shape it out. If it isn’t working then, it isn’t working. The underlying rhythm track here was made a while ago and part of the original idea, so I wanted to keep it no matter how out of tune and time it was. Underneath, I’m singing the 1919 annual report from the sewing room from a NC asylum. I had the melody, mostly, but not the narrative so In walked around the kitchen poking the question What is this song about? until I knew. The indispensable person who keeps the world turning is Sarah, a washerwoman taking in laundry, raising the sun, dispensing time, and everything else, cleaning all our souls.
A special thank you to Hannah Jacobs and Lou Brown on this one, for finding all the annual reports and visiting all the sewing rooms.