“DEEP THOUGHTS FROM THE METAMORPHOSIS DEPARTMENT”
SEPTEMBER 2023
Lovelies,
I haven't felt like creating this month.
Before the fire, I was on fire. I mean creatively I was on fire. I mean before the fire, I was creating a lot.
And thanks goodness I was! I'm in the midst of an immense project. One that has a TIMELINE. One that has a rapidly approaching alleged FINISH LINE. Before the fire, I kept saying: I don't know how I'm possibly creating this much, but we NEED me to be creating this much, so NOBODY MOVE until this thing is over!
And in truth, creating like whoa is not uncommon for me. I've been wildly creative for a good long while now.
So yeah, it's a very different experience of myself to suddenly not create anything.
I'm not losing my mind about it. I'm not doing the whole, "Will I ever create again?" routine. I've been around the block. I know by now to save the drama for the page.
But I've been curious.
It's felt like a channel closed. And this concerned me because I don't believe in that.
So I asked myself what I do believe. And I remembered: I believe when we aren't creating it's because some aspect of our creative terrain needs tending. In my case, that would have to be rest. Rest to sort and tag a backlog of ash-stained images. Rest to adjust to this tidal shift from giving help to receiving help. Rest to equal parts grieve and celebrate how not just my physical life but my social life has metaphorphosized within three weeks.
I will not deny I need rest.
But something else occurred to me in the past few days. I noticed that really I'm creating as much as ever. I'm creating the stubborn resolve to approach each day with grace. I'm creating meaning, deep spirit-sung meaning, from not just the fire but every swerving interaction since. And now, as of two days ago, I've moved, and here I begin the process of creating a new home.
So yeah. It's not that I'm not creating. It's just I don't want to create anything ELSE right now.
Maybe we're all always creating. Maybe creativity it's never an issue of creating more or less, but simply what.
There you go, some deep thoughts from the metamorphosis department.
Wishing you joy with WHATEVER you are creating this month,
Rachel
Something I love about writing for other artists is how much I get to be myself -- parts of myself that don't come out when I write for myself, but are nonetheless true, maybe even more true for how long they've gone unexpressed.
I love Shaina's story -- her resilience through childhood illness, her passion for music, her bright-as-the-sun spirit. So it was an honor to articulate her story in her first single, God Be With You Always. Thank you to the brilliant Narada Michael Walden for bringing me on and to Shaina and Narada for the beautiful collaboration.
“FIRE”
August 2024
Lovelies,
On Tuesday, 7/30, I woke pre-dawn to the feeling that something wasn't right. I told myself to go back to sleep but the feeling lingered so I could not. I wondered if maybe someone was breaking into our cars again and cajoled myself out of bed to look through the window -- and saw a strange orange glow. What happened next was undoubtedly fast but feels held in time. I put on the nearest clothes and headed toward the door, thought better and went to the bedside table for my phone, stepped toward the kitchen for my keys, but only when I saw flames moving toward me did I realize my apartment was on fire.
Long story short, I'm fine. Everyone is fine. My apartment and belongings burned in the East Bay Booksellers fire and I'm currently displaced, staying with my wonderful friend, Beth, in Pinole.
My apartment was a lot of things. Fountain of three hundred songs, stardust for friendships, backdrop of countless tea-sipping conversations, reading nook, sunset lookout, makeshift yoga studio, haven for world-weary songwriters, favorite hour of the week for aspiring pianists, celery juice factory, nexus of my creativity empire. And also a secret thing, that I only now have the clarity to articulate. It was the empty box where I arrived, over a decade ago, with neurological Lyme disease and PTSD. It was where every day I moved through their layers, claiming pieces of myself until I'd constituted the whole of me. And it was where, again and again, I updated every detail of art and furniture and appliance to match. Those who know me know I'm MINIMALIST. I didn't own much. But what I owned was beautiful, considered -- added as it uplifted me and removed as soon as it no longer applied. For most of my stay, my apartment was a realer skin than my own. I felt this inward and outward becoming culminate just WEEKS ago, when I said and MEANT: I am FREE. I am SAFE. I put the last touches on my apartment -- a new bedspread, a print of a wave above my piano -- and felt, for the first time in my lifetime, home.
The timing of this fire is uncanny.
I think of my daily affirmation of the past year. Part one: "I'm free." As I mentioned, now true. Part two: "I'm safe." Again, now defiantly true. Oh, but then part three: "I'm at home in the world." It's not lost on me that though my keys now open nothing, this week I was handed more keys than I could keep straight. SO MANY PEOPLE opened their homes to me. I mean. I have a lot of keys in my (new) bag. So maybe just... be careful what you affirm! If you tell the angels you're at home in the world, they may go and burn down your very first home to prove the point!
Also home: The phone calls. The hugs. The donated clothes. The offered furniture. The cleared office space. And then my beautiful friend, Ellen, floored me with a GoFundMe, and even as I shudder to accept such help, with every donation I think, "That's a hairbrush," "That's a salad bowl," "That's a bed."
I don't think I'm ready to make a new home. Perhaps I will be tomorrow. But for now, I surrender, I practice: I'm at home in the world.
All my love,
Rachel
I was just on the phone with Dave and he let me know that his new album, Searching for a Home, released at last a couple weeks ago, PASSED 100K STREAMS ON SPOTIFY! This is a sparkling achievement for an independent artist, not to mention a BRAND NEW independent artist. What a remarkable introduction of David Hobbes to this world!
I am extremely proud of the work I did on this album. Dave's songs came to me with a deception of sameness and I set out to know how wildly unique each, in fact, was -- and then emphasize it with every choice. It felt like an unzipping, and what emerged was not JUST David Hobbes clever, not JUST David Hobbes crafty, but also utterly GROOVING. As usual, I called on my favorites to do what makes them my favorites: Jason Slota (drums), James DePrato (guitar), Aaron Shaul (bass), Max Cowan (keys), Erik Jekabson (trumpet), Cory Wright (saxophone), AJ Hicks (background vocals), Gabriel Shepard (engineer), Michael Rosen (engineer), Reto Peter (mixing), and Ken Lee (mastering). I co-wrote, produced, arranged, played piano, and sang a slew of background vocals.
Please enjoy these folkful, popful, delightful songs.
“BOTH EXTREMES, SIMULTANEOUSLY”
OCTOBER 2024
Lovelies,
After the fire on 7/30 I had no interest in home.
I didn't want to look at new places. I didn't want to so much as look at listings. Peace was promising myself a year without an address -- traveling, visiting friends, everywhere and nowhere.
It was as if I'd just gotten out of a relationship and wasn't ready to date again.
It was extreme. So extreme, in fact, that I recognized it was temporary. Not a destination but a transit.
And indeed mere days later I met its opposite: from someplace deeper than I'd known, an ache for home.
I looked at three places and chose the third. I wanted to be only there. A couple weeks later I experienced moving in without anything to move in. I sat in the empty space of home and heard the echo of 100% potential. I did my best to resume work but leading rehearsal felt like gesturing from the other side of glass. Singing melody felt like sewing with invisible thread. Writing prose felt like sand through my fingers. Because, I finally realized, until home wasn't empty space, all I could stand to create was home.
This, too, was extreme. And again, I recognized it was so extreme it must be temporary.
In a sense pendulum swings are not new to me. I only make decisions after choosing the far reaches of each option with my whole heart.
And as is often the case, the result now is not some third, compromising option. It is, instead, both extremes, simultaneously. Currently that looks like 1) A full-body commitment to home: trappings of belonging, Rachel headquarters, both cocoon and launch pad for my creative present. And 2) An aversion to being anywhere near it. I left town! I don't care to go back anytime soon! It can just be there, chilling in its echoing emptiness, while I ignore the living hell out of it.
Yeah, I'm traveling. And without those empty walls whispering for me to cover them, my BRAIN is back online. It feels nice to work again.
All my love,
Rachel
This month I had the most fun allowed a human producing the new Jennifer Greer single, Get Out Motherfucker.
Incidentally, trigger warning: language and politics.
Jenny is a dear friend and I'm happy to say our friendship only sparkled brighter with this opportunity to co-create. She gave me a piano bass line and vocal, but I felt the agro stirring and I'm happy to report it's my most grungy fierce rocker to date. Jenny killed it on vocals. And Daniel Fabricant (bass), Jason Slota (drums), and James DePrato (guitar) showed off ALL their latent Zeppelin sensibilities. Further credit to Michael Rosen for tracking, Reto Peter for mixing, Ken Lee for mastering, and, as you might expect, that's me, Jenny, Rosen, and DePrato screaming.