I wrote a bunch of songs between 1997 and 2007, but didn’t put an album together until 2013 (with the mastering help of New York jazz pianist Robert Cowie). Each year that I get farther away from those songs I get less judgmental about my creativity. This means the songs sound better to me now, so I’d like to write about them. Consider these “liner notes.” (Updated in 2021: find my songs on Apple Music and Spotify).

On this album I sing and play electric bass. A wonderful Chicago jazz musician named Neal Alger is on guitar. A guy named Jean Leroy did the percussion, but he’s only on a few tracks.

“Going of Age” – This is one of my favorites. It’s about facing the reality that you’re not a young woman any more and you’re only going to get older from here, but that’s okay because there’s a power and grace to being older. I loved this song when I wrote it at age 37 and still do at age 48.

“Moving Through Madness” – One of my songs about depression, although it’s so upbeat, the music sounds pretty cheerful. It means a lot to me that a friend who also lives with chronic depression says she’s played this song over and over again at certain times in her life. In real liner notes, I’d dedicate this song to her. It’s been a powerful song for me too and contains one of my favorite lyrics: “I am everything you could ever want in a woman, plus the nightmare.” I’m sure my ex-husband would agree (I wrote it years before I met
him).

“Not So Bad” – another song about depression that sounds happy and upbeat (I don’t know why that happens). This one tells the story of a very depressed Valentine’s weekend I spent in 2003. I really did go to a dance where I started hanging out with the congero who was about 15 years younger than me (I was 37). He had bought flowers for a young woman he thought was going to be at the dance. He drove me home and when I got out, he said, “Wait.” And he reached into his back seat and pulled out this big flower arrangement and gave it to me. I loved it. I turned the evening into a short story and then that song.

“An Atheist’s Prayer” – This song expresses how I feel about my atheism: lonely. I wish I had a god to turn to for comfort.

“The Baker’s Prayer” – Twenty years ago, I read a children’s story about a baker who prays in a unique way to God, but I failed
to make note of the name or title of the book. Years after reading
it (when I still believed in a mechanistic universe), I turned it into a  song in the hope that someone would recognize it and tell me how to find that book. Now I don’t care so much.

“Solterona” – this is my only song with a chorus that’s half in English and half in Spanish (the Spanish is a translation of the English) and I got help with it from my mother. My mother had strong language skills and I never could have written a chorus like this without the help of a bilingual with some poetry in her. She received my gratitude when she first heard the recording back in 2004. “Solterona” means “spinster” (as in Spinster Power!). “Tía Verónica” is a fictionalized version of my real Aunt Veronica who never married, but don’t tell her.

“The Penguin Song” – This was a favorite of people who came to see me back when I used to perform in Chicago (my audiences were probably mostly friends and ex-lovers, ha!). I used to introduce it
by saying, “And now a song about the lesser sung animals.” Other verses are about a hedgehog and a cicada.

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook