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On Mythmaking

Recently, I read the delightful graphic novel Mythmakers by John Hendrix. It’s a beautiful telling of the lives of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and their fascinating friendship. I highly recommend it to anyone, though it would be a particularly wonderful present for any young people in your life who enjoy fantasy novels and are maybe even trying their hand at writing stories of their own.

One thread I keep coming back to from the book is the very concept of “mythmaking”. Lewis and Tolkien understood themselves as continuing in a tradition that spans all the way back to Mesopotamian creation myths and epics, though they had a shared affinity for Norse mythology in particular. In conversation with that tradition, they each created new myths of their own, ushering in the age of fantasy novels as we know it.1

I think this primed me well to enjoy Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey as a participation in that tradition, not a mere translation of Homer’s work for the screen. I did enjoy it, and although I generally place a high value on accuracy in adaptations, I wonder whether the ancients were even purists themselves when it came to retelling stories. I also wonder: if a mythic retelling becomes less faithful to the original text in order to become more faithful to the values of our current time and place, does it become more or less valuable of a retelling?2 I would say more, if we allow ourselves to reckon with those differences.

There are loads of conflicting views on the movie, which I mainly find humorous. Either way, I selfishly couldn’t be more thrilled that the world is abuzz about Greek mythology right now. And it’s making me revisit the reasons why Lewis sought to retell the myth of Cupid and Psyche in the novel Till We Have Faces.

An Unjust Telling

From as early as his undergraduate years, before his conversion to Christianity, Lewis attempted to write a poetic retelling of the myth as told in Apeleius’ Metamorphoses (125 A.D.). Fragments of these attempts survive and were documented by Walter Hooper in C.S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide:

The tale of Psyche is unjustly told
And half of the truth concealed by all who hold
With Apuleius…

…Two Cinderella’s sisters, who must come
To visit Psyche in her secret home
And envy it: and for no other cause
Tempt her to break that fairy country’s laws—
Which leads to her undoing. But all this
Is weighted on one side and told amiss.
It’s like the work of some poetic youth,
Angry, and far too certain of the truth,
Mad from the gleams of vision that claim to find
Bye ways to something missed by all mankind.
He thinks that only envy or dull eyes
Keep all men from believing in the prize
He holds in secret. In revenge he drew
—For portrait of us all— the sisters two,
Misunderstanding them: and poets since
Have followed. (246-247)

These fragments show Lewis’ unwillingness to easily assent to the cliché of the jealous stepsister, and that he sees legitimate reasons for Psyche’s sisters to distrust her lover, who has gifted her with a lavish palace but conceals his identity and only visits her in the dark (I mean, what??).

Decades later, when Lewis finally cracked the code and finished his retelling in novel form, he wrote in the postscript:

Along with this key alteration, Lewis makes things more complicated by portraying Psyche not as a gullible girl, but a noble woman. Or rather: he makes Psyche truly beautiful, not merely in appearance but in soul. Orual’s inability to see the palace is in tension with the fact that Psyche is an extremely coherent and trustworthy person—someone to be believed. By maintaining the core actions of these characters while changing the why (Orual’s fear, disbelief, and possessiveness lead her to force an unthinkable choice onto Psyche, and Psyche’s love and pity leads her to obey Orual and betray her lover), it leads to a much more complicated, compelling, and piercing story.

I can imagine Lewis reading the older tellings of the myth as transmissions in a long game of telephone, reexamining the details until a clearer picture presents itself. “No, Apeleius, Psyche wouldn’t ever have tried to jump in the river–she would never end her life, even if she would willingly be a sacrifice. Someone really tormented must have done that–perhaps her sister!”.

Indeed, Lewis plays with this idea within the novel itself. At the end of Book I, when Orual stumbles into a temple for a new goddess, she realizes Psyche’s new worshippers are pretty mixed up on key details of her story. Enraged, Orual goes back home and writes her account, hoping to set things straight. But even she isn’t a reliable narrator, as she soon finds out! More on that next time.

UPCOMING RELEASE!

Some of you already know that we are releasing the first single from our upcoming album on Friday, August 7th!! You can pre-save to help us out, or stay in the loop here. Although I’ve been sharing demos here for less than a year, this whole project began 6 years ago, and we’re amped to start sharing it with the world. Rest assured, I’ll still be sharing demos on here moving forward as we anticipate a Part 1 release in the fall and a Part 2 release in the spring. Yes, it’s a double album!

But today, instead of a demo, I’d like to share an exclusive sneak peek of our upcoming release for you Substack readers, along with the full lyrics. It’s my attempt to portray Lewis’ Psyche: not a helpless girl, but a woman following a divine call into the unknown.

PSYCHE

I never knew my mother’s touch
And father is no father to me
All of my life I’ve had a notion of
Someone I’ve yet to meet

Of better things and better answers
Of stronger winds and death in reverse
I think there is a deeper magic that’s
Somehow in the curse

Are you the one putting mad ideas in my head?
Cause everyone is telling me to put this all to bed

Oh I was born simply to be
Sent off into a stranger’s embrace
To give my body for a child
Just like my mother’s fate

So why would I be afraid of skipping to the other side?
And finding out what valleys and rivers lay behind?

All of my life I’ve been preparing
To transcend this bitter earth
I know I’ll leave nothing behind
That won’t come and follow, I’m sure

Are you the one who is beckoning me on to something true?
Or is it all just an emptiness behind the curtain blue?

There is only one way to know, and I’m ready to go

The power of communication is in large part what drew me to songwriting. Yet try as I might to express myself clearly and to thus be understood, I eventually must release control—or rather, recognize that I never had control over how others understand or perceive me and the work of my hands. It’s true that I’ve received so much affirmation from people about this project, and that seeking shared understanding is a perfectly natural and good thing. But I have to admit that I can never truly know what it’s like to hear my own work from an outside perspective—an abyss of unknown size between my intention and how I am received. Alas!1

Yet I know I’m not alone in this conundrum. Recently, I’ve been digging into the wonderfully extensive C.S. Lewis: Companion & Guide by Walter Hooper.

From various correspondence detailed in the book, I now know that C.S. Lewis had quite the time unpacking with people what he was trying to do in Till We Have Faces:

Poor Mr. Lewis! If only you could see how many people love and understand this book now!

It seems that Christians who were ready to receive Narnia’s magic and the Space Trilogy’s Merlin references were not ready for a slightly more eastern, ancient religious backdrop. And I think there are other aspects to the book that work against an immediate receptivity—aspects which also make it a better book. Not convolution for convolution’s sake, but a fruitful ambiguity.

As we’ve discussed earlier, this book is not a straightforward Christian allegory3, which could offer a short-hand for understanding the soul of the book and its characters. The narrator of the story is not wholly reliable (though probably more reliable than most people if they were forced to give an account of their whole life, including their biggest tragedies and failures). And the author doesn’t flat-out tell you whether the gods are real or not; you are invited to make your own decision, just like the characters. So reality is ambiguous, which leads to moral ambiguity. Is the palace real or not? Is Psyche mad, or is Orual jealous? Are these the only two options?

You are also invited to choose between Fox and Priest. The Fox’s clean rationalism and emphasis on virtue and reason are familiar to us and more easily relatable. The Priest is creepy, intense, and believes in occasional human sacrifice. But a careful read shows that Lewis is pitting these characters and their worldviews against each other to create a mirror for our own modern presuppositions.

Ultimately, Lewis is showing that the truth lies somewhere beyond a false dichotomy of reason and religion, of natural and supernatural. In Christian Apologetics, Lewis writes,

”…Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord.”

The dialogue between these two secondary characters is one of my favorite parts of the book, and I had great fun trying to capture it in a song. Don’t worry—you’ll know which voice is which. It’s still just a demo, but has a fair bit of production on it already. Enjoy!

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The Priest and The Fox

The gods are jealous and won’t endure
The worship of another
The crops are dying, the people crying
For the sin to be discovered
They will be found out

No, the gods are not so!
And maybe the gods are not at all
I’m not afraid to say it plain
You won’t take me for a fool

The gods are angry, their name profaned,
And someone must atone
The gods will smite you, you have no right 
To set your wits against their own

See wit brings no rain, grows no grain
Sacrifice does both

Cursed chance that brings the rain
Right after the slaughter, O my daughter!

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A Visit to the Marion E. Wade Center

One of the unexpected joys of my travels last month was a visit with my parents during a 6 hour layover in O’Hare. They picked me up, took me to lunch, and booked an appointment at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. I felt utterly spoiled—best layover ever!

For those who do not know, the Marion E. Wade Center is a research center dedicated primarily to the Inklings and other writers such as George MacDonald and Dorothy Sayers. They have acquired loads of Inklings paraphernalia—library collections, letters, furniture, reading glasses, typewriters, etc. They even have the alleged wardrobe that inspired it all, from the Lewis’ attic. (I wonder what the Brits who auctioned these items off must think of us, the way we treasure these things as holy relics!) I was so charmed by the center’s museum and reading room, which contains collections from personal libraries, volumes of letter correspondence, and more.

I have minimal photos, because 1. they have very reasonable policies on photography at the museum and 2. it’s a place better experienced in person rather than mediated through a screen. But below is one photo of me with the first UK and US editions of Till We Have Faces. The folks at the Kilby Reading Room had these laid out for me in anticipation of our visit, and we exchanged humorous remarks about the cover art. Lewis himself collaborated with the illustrator on the UK edition (the black one, pictured in my left hand), desiring to juxtapose the clean rationalism of the Greeks with the dark, pagan religiosity of Glome. As the archivist there told me, “it leaves something to be desired”—but I appreciate the concept (and at the end of this post, I’ll share another book design that I think nails it!)

More exciting than that—next to me in this photo is the very typewriter on which the TWHF manuscript was typed, by none other than Joy Davidman.

Till We Have Faces and Joy Davidman

I’m well aware that waxing on about C.S. Lewis is about the lowest-hanging fruit ever in the world of Christian thought and literature. And yet—the more I learn about Lewis’ life as a whole, the more intrigued I am by him and his work. As I hear of one fall-from-grace to the next these days, I am grateful for the earnestness and consistency with which a very public (though surely imperfect) Christian lived their life. And it’s impossible not to be interested in Lewis’ wild, unexpected, emotional later years with his marriage to Joy Davidman. If you don’t know much about this already, I highly recommend reading about it. Walter Hooper’s book, C.S. Lewis: Companion & Guide, tells the story particularly well.

I was not in the least surprised several years ago when I found out that not only did Joy type up TWHF, but that she had an indispensable role in its conception and writing (confirmed by Joy’s letters and also by her son Douglas—the book is also dedicated to her). I don’t have huge issues with Lewis’ female characters in his other books, and I adore many of them… but when I first read TWHF, there was a clear female voice in the story that felt new, and real. It’s no wonder I was drawn to it; I was hearing myself in the story. I was noticing a clearer picture of the female experience.

Orual, Psyche, and Redival have their prototypes for sure in Lewis’ earlier works: the possessive/unrequited friend or lover, the Edenic innocent (most obviously, Lucy Pevensie), the wanton woman. But there’s more dimension here and more space to show their subtleties. And of course, Orual takes center stage and says so many things so unapologetically and so womanly. When I first read Orual’s epiphany: “I am Ungit” (314), I in turn realized: “I am Orual”. This was not a flattering realization, but it was an important one.

I can’t escape the influence of C.S. Lewis. But more than that, I can’t escape how much the character of Orual (and Psyche, and Redival too) makes me feel seen in a way I hadn’t before. Regardless of the extent of Joy’s collaboration on this book—her imprint is clear. And from the bit that I have learned about her, I think she would think of it fondly and humorously that she was able to contribute the burden of the female perspective to the work.

I look forward to sharing more of my thoughts on these wonderful female characters in my next posts, but as this is a 50% words, 50% music kind of space, I’ll stop here for now and share what has become the intro track to the album. It’s called “Ravenous”. It seeks to introduce some of the story and important themes of the book. Riffing off of that delicious Orual quote: “the sin of being born woman is the sin the gods will never forgive”.

RAVENOUS

There were three sisters, each one of a kind
We were three sisters, each one of a kind
One foolish, one strong, one pure
One fair, one marred, one beautiful

This is the tale of our undoing,
The end of our happiness
The is a tale about losing
Of a heart turned ravenous

There were three princesses, their fates like those of old
We were three princesses, our fates like those of old
One for sacrifice, one for purchase, one forgotten

The sin of being born woman is the sin the gods will never forgive
The sin of being born woman, it’s the one thing they’ll never forgive

Like Andromeda, Iphegenia, Antigone,
Such is the tale of our poor, poor Pysche

This is the tale of our undoing,
The end of our happiness
The is a tale about losing
Of the heart’s intransigence,
Of a false antagonist,
In the final analysis,
Of a heart turned ravenous

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The Plausibility of Polytheism

Growing up, I was equal parts enamored and confounded by Greek mythology. I remember the day I picked up an anthology of myths from our local Barnes & Noble and spent weeks poring over it. I was drawn in by the stories and complex webs of relationships. However, being raised in a Christian environment, I found the premise of a pantheon of gods incredibly far-fetched, even ridiculous.

Similar to the bafflement a secular person might find in my belief in one (Triune!) God, I found it incomprehensible that anyone could have believed in such a dysfunctional family of gods and goddesses with differing motivations, levels of power, and moral values. There was a bit of scorn in my disbelief, akin to the scorn we collectively have for bygone medical practices such as leech blood-letting and scientific beliefs such as geocentrism, with that implicit and unfounded belief that “we would have never believed in such things!”1. It was a worldview that bore no resonance for me.

But now that I’ve lived some life, I’ve come to realize that polytheism offers a somewhat plausible explanation for the chaos, dissonance, and disaster we experience in the world. In ancient times, how would a religious person have understood a failed crop, deathly illness, or natural disaster? Perhaps it was the result of a secret abomination, an offense against another god or goddess, or an unfortunate, wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time situation in the crossfires of a tiff between the gods themselves.

Honestly–it’s not as irrational as I once thought. Moving from Greece to Mesopotamia for a moment: while monotheists like Job and his friends wrestled with theodicy, I wonder if polytheists a few miles away would have attempted to offer him any number of alternative explanations. Now, I would say that if we know enough of Job’s story, it seems pretty clear that he would not have been easily swayed.2 But the more I try to place myself in the circumstance of the ancient pagan, the more sympathy I feel, along with deep sadness. I understand the logic now, but ultimately, I can’t see a path to peace, goodness, and justice for a human living under the shadow of mercurial, amoral gods.3

It’s almost too obvious to say it, but that lack of peace and goodness can also be felt in our modern lives. We think we are immune to the forces of uncertainty and instability, until we are not. We are inundated by the news, the stock market, pandemic, acts of mass violence, social unrest, the rising cost of living, climate change, wars, and volatile political situations. We might not believe that displeasing a pantheon of anthropomorphized gods is what got us here, but we do turn to whatever could get us out of the situation.

We pin our hopes and fears on the newest gurus, administrations, trends. We seek better self-help models, routines, and technology. We turn to distraction and pleasure and things that numb our uneasy feelings. We too reckon with chaos and order, good and evil, death and life, the beautiful and the ugly–just in a more mediated, simulated reality than our ancient counterparts. And if we find ourselves operating out of fear, adoration, or slavery to a multiplicity, a host of these different forces, how different is that from polytheism? Instead, we call it idolatry–which is apt, if we actually throw the idols away once they are revealed to be as such.

When overwhelm and crises hit, we find out what we actually worship, what we actually fear, and what we actually love. They reveal our secret superstitions and the way we try to hedge our bets between God, Mammon, and other things we’ve shoved in our drawers.

And then, the observation of our own human behavior in these moments can actually hurdle us toward a clarified theological belief. And this is the kind of unflinching, under-the-microscope treatment which Lewis gives his characters in TWHF and invites us to undergo ourselves. This is a classic Lewis endgame, yet within the opaqueness of this novel’s pagan setting, it is harder and more gloriously won.

With that in mind, I’d like to share the next demo from our concept album. It’s called Meddle. This song describes the setting of the story that will unfold. Bardia, beloved side character and captain of the guard, is the perfect guide into the fictional, ancient country of Glome.

MEDDLE

We live in a land where a river runs
Right between the city gates and the temple
The king holds court while the incense smokes
And his subjects cross their fingers and tremble

In harvest or drought, every funeral or birth
We offer our best to the gods
Slit the pigeon’s throat, lay it on the sacred stone
Let the blood do its best to atone 
                        
Poppies and pennyroyals, elixirs too strong for me                        
The less I meddle with the gods, the less they’ll meddle with me                                           
Deified mortals, and matters too high for me                   
The less I meddle with the gods, the less they’ll meddle with me
               
I’m a simple and god-fearing man
I’m a soldier who likes to take orders
But to judge between man and the powers that be?
No, it’s best that I stay in my quarters

I do everything I do for my wife and my sons
And for them I will make a libation
The one who in rage shakes their fist to the sky
Will have nothing to say when they die
                        
Poppies and pennyroyals, elixirs too strong for me                        
The less I meddle with the gods, the less they’ll meddle with me                                           
Deified mortals, and matters too high for me                   
The less I meddle with the gods, the less they’ll meddle with me
Full moons and sacrifice and daughters too brave for me
The less I meddle with the gods, the less they’ll meddle with me                                              
A princess, a pilgrimage, a protest too loud for me.  
The less I meddle with the gods, the less they’ll meddle with me

I’ve always loved the moment in the book when Bardia shrugs his shoulders and says, “the less Bardia meddles with the gods, the less the gods meddle with Bardia”. He’s an upright and pragmatic individual who fears God and is content with not having all the answers, providing an interesting contrast to certain “meddlers” in the story. I’m excited to delve into these others characters more in the months to come!

In the meantime, please let me know what you think in the comments: do you agree that polytheism has some relevancy today? How do you understand the polytheistic society that Lewis presents in TWHF? Do you resonate with Bardia, or more so with another character from the book?

In the summer of 2016, I spent a lot of time by myself. I was a college student back in my hometown for a few months, puttering around the childhood home without much of a plan. No summer job, no schedule packed with fun trips and music festivals, as was my usual custom. I was processing an intense first year of conservatory and needed some time and space to do so.

In order to show to myself, my parents, and my cello teacher that I was “applying myself” in some way, I embarked on a project to study and record the first Bach and Britten cello suites. But I could only spend so much time practicing each day1, and thus, I had a lot of time on my hands–perhaps too much time.

Audiobooks became a helpful way for me to move about the world–do laundry, drive to the post office, go on walks–without my brain endlessly ruminating on several tenuous situations in my professional and personal life. A good story was key, and additionally, a good narrator, so I would listen to the 30-second preview on Apple Books to make sure the voice wasn’t too grating or robotic. Sifting through titles on my phone, I noticed a book that had recently come up in conversation with a family member. They had started reading it, but put it down unfinished, saying something to the effect of, “it’s pretty depressing, and I’m not sure about it”. I didn’t think much of it at the time, though it did surprise me that a book by C.S. Lewis could elicit that kind of reaction.

Well, I thought to myself, maybe a good voice actor can offer an engaging interpretation. I pressed play.

“I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please.”

The voice was weathered, with a kick of dry spite.

In this first encounter with Till We Have Faces, the narrator’s heavy mood, the unexpected plot, and the extremely compelling characters engaged my curiosity and got me outside of myself. I savored the 8-hour recording in small pieces as I went about my solitary days. But when I got to the end, something sparked in me and I knew I had to now pick up the physical book and devour it all over again, quickly. I felt an urgency to reabsorb the words, the motivations, the themes of the book–because I had a nagging feeling that to better understand the book would be to better understand myself.

I would go on to re-visit this book habitually over the next several years, sometimes going straight to a particular passage, or reading the whole book over again. And then, one day, about 5 years ago, I started writing Sisters, which I shared in my first post. And then came another song, and another, and another.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some think that I am a bit crazy for loving this book as much as I do. And I admit that I am someone who is drawn to darker things, which is not always a virtuous quality. I also fully accept that not everyone will like this book! Many of my friends and family have been very thrown off by the bleak setting and seemingly ambiguous message. Some of them had read Chronicles of Narnia and were expecting something with a similar amount of accessibility. Where is Aslan? Where is the allegory? Who are we supposed to trust in this book? What am I to make of this pantheistic society?

Other friends of mine heroically made it to the end of the book and told me, “I just don’t get it”. Perhaps you’ve encountered this same thing, or have had a similar sense of disorientation when others have wildly different takes on a beloved book, musical artist, movie, etc.

As I write this, I can’t help but see some sort of connection to that summer when I studied Bach and Britten.

Bach Cello Suite No. 1, Prelude

Bach Cello Suite no. 1 is one of the most beloved pieces of Western art music, and rightly so. It is beautiful and graceful. It is aesthetically pleasing, and exceedingly tonal in the crystal-clear key of G Major. It is one of the first serious pieces I ever learned on the cello, and it is one I will keep returning to for the rest of my life (and probably all of eternity).

And then there is the Britten.

Britten Cello Suite No. 1, Fuga and Serenata

It has its moments of beauty and grace, and also, its jagged edges, tonal ambiguity, and complexity. I remember a friend listening to me prepare both pieces, and it was humorous to see him trying to conceal his preference for the Bach! Yet, for me and my colleagues who have plumbed the depths of the Britten, we are much like scuba divers who took the time to get ourselves to the coastline, put all the gear on, and experienced the discomfort of changes in pressure, all in order to find treasures under the water–coming back up into the fresh air with glints in our eyes.

To riff on Ecclesiastes, I believe there is a time for Bach and a time for Britten. There is a time for art that testifies to the untarnished beauty in and around us, and there is a time for art that testifies to what has been tarnished–to the jagged edges in and around us, and perhaps contemplate their redemption.

Lest I sound pretentious, let me place myself on the opposite side of this experience. For many years I have fought to understand any small portion, let alone the entirety, of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. (Now we are really talking about ambiguity and complexity!) Some lines I would find quite beautiful, and somewhat graspable:

“Time present and time past
 Are both perhaps present in time future
 And time future contained in time past.”

Which would immediately be followed by lines that I neither enjoyed nor understood:

“Garlic and sapphires in the mud
 Clot the bedded axle-tree.”

But I have been persistent. It has been 11 years since I first read Four Quartets. The other day, out of the blue, while recording vocal takes in our studio and gazing at this beautiful lettering piece on our wall, something clicked in a new way. One step towards understanding in an ephemeral “shaft of sunlight” moment. I still have a long way to go.

I don’t think anyone has the capacity to love every piece of art ever made, and few books are for everyone. But for me personally, when I think of Orual’s descent into possessive love, the implications of physical beauty for one’s experience as a woman, and a bunch of characters trying to figure out whether there is someone really hearing their prayers behind the veil, and if so, whether their intentions toward them are good… they testify to such matters in my own life as well.

So, friends—what was your own first experience with this book? What grabbed you, surprised you, delighted you, confused you, or even disturbed you? Let’s dive in together.

So why start a Substack? Well, firstly, I want to connect with the broader community of people who love this book as much (or even more) than I do. I can’t count the number of times I have heard from someone at a concert of mine, or simply mid-conversation, that Till We Have Faces is one of their favorite books. These experiences got me thinking that we need to have a landing place for more conversation about this relatively obscure Lewis novel!

The second purpose of this Substack is to share snippets of music and lyrics from our* album in the works. While I may be venturing into the world of prose, songwriting is the medium in which I am most at home. And in this content-saturated world, I would be delighted to share this music directly with an attentive community of TWHF fans!

So, I can’t start things off here without previewing a song, and I will begin with the one that started it all. To the many friends who have asked me, “is that song about the sisters out on Spotify yet?”, I’m happy to report that the studio version is underway. In the meantime, consider this simple demo a small token of appreciation for your encouragement, patience, and, frankly, accountability!

For those new to my project, these songs are written in the perspectives of the different (and beloved) characters in the story, while gently tracing the story’s narrative arc.

Let me know in the comments which character’s voice you think this is—pretty low-hanging fruit for this one—and if you spot any quotations from the book, which I’ve peppered throughout my songs. Sometimes there’s no point in rewording Lewis when he says it best!

Sisters/Rewrite

Feels like you’re daily less mine
We used to sit behind the pear trees in our youth
Sisters in summer’s bloom

But your eyes
Kept wandering to the mountains
Oh how I
Longed to steal your daydreams
And hide them
Somewhere safe
Where I could learn them
Or maybe you would just forget

Your legs grow long and that’s fine
I always knew you’d grow to be the bigger man
And journey to far-off lands

But don’t forget
Who raised you that way
And don’t forget
To take her along
And don’t forget
Who loved you first
I loved you first

Could I rewrite the memory?
Could I rewrite our story?
You would whisper secrets in my ear, your tears would soak my shirt
And our joy would be a sun that never sets

Seems like you’re happy to go
Yes he swept you off your feet that fateful day
I wished we could run away

But your charity
Was worse than knowing you could be so glad
Without me
Oh my dreadful heart
Is one part love, five parts anger, seven pride

I wanted to be everything to you
But you already had everything
You already had everything
And all I had was you

*”our” refers to my band, davy, which is comprised of my husband and me. We’ve been writing, recording, and performing music since 2020. You’ll hear in our music a duality of acoustic folk and synth pop. One goal of this upcoming album is to achieve a synthesis of these influences–so you can expect more of that as we share more bits from the recording process. I’ve found that so much of music-making is a journey in finding one’s true voice, and not just “the babble that we think we mean” (can’t resist a TWHF reference).