Behind The Songs

April Fool

The album starts with “April Fool,” a whimsical cosmic carousel about falling in love with The Fool, an archetype that represents new beginnings, spontaneity, heading into the unknown, and trusting your instincts.

The Fool was absolutely the energy in my mid 20’s. I was ready to hit the ground running after grad school, and had moved to a new town for work opportunities. I was also starting to deconstruct my faith. Potential was everywhere.

I was also falling in love with someone who valued spontaneity. The Fool was his favorite tarot card. I met him on a Good Friday in April.

The InBetween

I woke up one day with no idea who I was, where I was, or what I was responsible for. It was a fleeting moment that was equal parts wonderful and scary. In the moment, I thought, “I’m in The InBetween.” It was the only moment of egolessness I’ve ever experienced. It passed quickly, and once I came to, I realized it was the autumnal equinox…earth’s day of perfect balance between light and dark. It was fitting.

I had recently become aware of how much anxiety I had around choice. Every choice was a crossroads with at least one path that was filled with regret, and I was always trying to avoid that path. And any state of not knowing which path to take next would leave me in that space of fear about choosing the “wrong” one. I would envision an avalanche of worst case scenarios that I felt powerless to stop.

But in one particular bodywork session, a different visual came to me. I was floating in the middle of a ring of doors in the sky. There was no ground. Just possibility. I felt that no matter which door I chose, I could always come back to this place and just try another door. My anxiety subsided immensely in that moment, and I’ve used that imagery many times since when I’ve gotten stuck in the “one best choice” ideology. That vision and my feeling of The InBetween were closely related.

Wild

While writing “Wild,” I felt drawn to the Latin words anima and animus as I was looking for words related to animal.

I was pretty enmeshed with family members as a kid. There were many parts of my true self that had to be caged in as a result. Letting them out felt like letting out a wild animal that would hurt people.

I kept envisioning this tigress in the cage. Dangerous, but also beautiful, powerful, and colorful. In the cage, she was barely a tiger. Released, she was running through the grass, stripes rippling in the sun, awesome to witness simply because she was herself. Yes, she could hurt people, but she was fully alive.

I went to the roots of the word animal and found concepts like intention, courage, passion, intelligence. It helped me believe that we’re all supposed to be wild in our own ways.

Wild and Wonderful is the motto of my home state of West Virginia. It means something deeper to me now.

What I’m Not

The seeds of this song were planted after a fight with someone who was having a hard time with my faith deconstruction.

I’d just finished my semi-annual music studio performance, and this one was a particularly great mountaintop experience where I felt aligned with my purpose, my passion, and my wonderful community. I was seeing how the personal growth I’d been committed to was bearing fruit.

But this person was seeing me in this super-negative way. The fact that I wasn’t a Christian anymore cast this really dark shadow over how they saw me and my heart. The only thing they could see was that I wasn’t a Christian.

The juxtaposition of those two experiences was so jarring in the moment.

Even though that situation was the impetus for writing the song, I’ve been amazed by how often the words have applied to other situations for me.

Sometimes people just can’t see us. Just because someone thinks we’re wrong or bad doesn’t mean we are.

Home

In my late 30’s, I started to realize that I didn’t really know what it meant to feel at home in the way many people meant it. I was pretty disconnected from an inner sense of safety, security, and comfort. The past several years has been a journey to reprogram my nervous system so it can access safety and to craft areas of life where I can truly feel at rest and unafraid to be my fully integrated self.

By the Sea

The song is a bit of a departure from the rest of the songs on ANIMA. It's meant to be a light balance to the weightier, more complex tunes, so it’s the last track on the album. A digestif.

By the Sea is a breezy little Django-esque tune that elicits the magical feel of laying by the waves with someone who makes you swoon. It was inspired by a story from a friend about a trip to Oceania, where he heard whales singing as he slept on his boat. A seaside dream.

My usual writing method takes lots of time, but this one showed up in about 30 minutes with a ukulele and a cup of coffee.