What does your current songwriting practice look like? Has that changed in the last few months? Has that changed again since the birth of your daughter (welcome to this side of the beautiful universe, Alice Moon!)?
Thank you, baby Moonie is such a Sweetheart. A couple months after our first daughter, Una, was born, I had a huge flow of inspiration and song writing. I can feel that coming soon with Alice. Birth is such a transportive process it brings up so much emotion and connection to our most primitive selves. When the time comes that ideas are bursting out of me, I will sit down at the piano—and even if they aren’t, I will show up! I've learned over the years that the first and most important step to any creative process is just showing up day after day, and allowing for the possibility of creation or even greatness. So, that is coming very soon…but for now and I am writing down and deciphering my dreams, paying attention to the magical details of this moment in time, and cuddling with 2 month old Moonie and taking it all in.
Motherhood is such a profound and constant force of re-centering. How has that heart-journey changed or impacted your sense of yourself as an artist? As a human?
Pregnancy and natural childbirth has connected me to the primal feminine in a way I never could have imagined. The total surrender and softening (both physically and emotionally) to make way for new life has inspired me into full on feminism this time around! Women are so incredible—they are a vortex of creation. The process of becoming a mother and now second-time mother has totally changed my understanding of who I am and what I came here to achieve. Pregnancy, birth, and motherhood also supports the idea that I've always kind of gleaned, which is: the more real life gets, the more psychedelic it feels.
Do your physical surroundings affect your creative process? Paint us a picture of what your creative spaces look like...
I wrote the bulk of my last album on Moon Mountain in Sonoma (Alice Moon is named after it)—I had a sense of freedom I’d never felt before, like I could really create my own reality and a way of life that I hadn’t even dreamt of yet. Living amongst towering oaks and fruit trees and on the top of a mountain changed me and my songwriting forever. You can hear the influence of Northern California and specifically, the mountain, in these songs—fully, spiritually connected to the soil on which it was made. I started writing music in New York City, where the energy of that place was something I had to assert myself against—and my last 3 albums have all been written in the country: Vermont, Hudson Valley, and now Sonoma. I love living and writing music in the country—it roots me to the essence of things and allows my work to unravel organically, patiently, and inspired.
