your feathery ebony
"you remember me" & free crow magnets
Hello everyone and hello, frost! May your days be slower and emptier this month as we circle in towards the shortest day.
I’m making my way down the track list of the new album, Never Had a Love Like This. Today we’re on “You Remember Me” , my over the top Sergent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band Love Song for Crows.
One particularly lonely winter, I came back from a long trip and was surprised to see a two crows following me on my morning walks, watching for the whole peanuts I fed them earlier in the year. Turns out crows can remember human faces for seven years! I played around with the ‘latin’ button on my keyboard and wrote this tune, morphing the digital clave beat into a my version of a samba.
The bridge of the song is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written:
Some say you are a little black patch of eternity / All that happened and all that’s meant to be / These days I really need to see / Your shadow, your feathery ebony /
Swinging, winging, wrapping around me
We did basic tracking for this one in NYC (piano, drums & bass), and then my friends Emily Songster and Billy Jonas here in Asheville overdubbed trombone and cymbals and more percussion (more, more!). Adrianne Blanks, Kara Irani, Micah Azalea & Ben Schweizbach joined me to sing in a background vocal chorus, and I also re-tracked the piano because it turned out the original piano takes were out of tune. Oh, this life!
My favorite part of the song is when Billy’s low drum enters in the second chorus, mimicking the sordo of a samba troupe. It’s one of a few elements inspired by Caetano Veloso’s “13 de Maio.”
God bless Whit Whitaker for mixing this giant pile of sound into a coherent piece! Listen to the final version of “You Remember Me” here.
Love,
Melanie
Holiday Special, today Friday December 4th-12th! While supplies last, all CD orders come with a free crow magnet! Folks in Asheville can use the code LOCAL for free shipping/IRL delivery with a hug. Today 12/4 is Bandcamp Friday, the best day to support indie musicians.
Kickstarter friends: If you haven’t yet gotten your pre-order, I probably still need your mailing address. Please hit reply to send it to me.
wind in my sails
My friend El Kleiner at The Whispering Tree released their stunning new album The Bones of Better Days ! I consider this a sister record to my own - El and I finished our projects side by side, meeting weekly for almost 18 months (!!!) to turn in drafts and give one another a to-dos for the week. Listening to their album feels like the closest I’ll get to hearing my own - I’m very intimate with the material and process yet oblivious to the painstaking labor within each track. I first heard El’s demo of “Letting Myself Go” in our songwriting workshop, and am still just obsessed. I sing it to myself all the time.
These two Ethiopian legends, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s solo piano & Mulatu Astake’s “Tezeta (Nostolgia).”
TLDR! Holiday special this week - all CDs come with a free crow magnet while supplies last.