Songs from My Mother

The Deep Roots of the Songbird

A short post today, but almost always a song for you.

I know this song because of my mother, which is a common story. Many artists have had that art put in them by a parent. My personal artistic awakening happened a little later on, but the root came from her.

Interestingly, my mom was part of a folk duo a la the female version of Simon & Garfunkel. They were really good. But her bandmate got married at 18, my mom stayed in Saskatchewan, became a teacher, and had her kids—and that was it, except for the occasional guitar strum in the living room.

C’est la vie. And here I am.

As I often mention, we are from the same hometown as Joni Mitchell. And although I never grew up listening to her, I did grow up listening to my mother singing songs from the era. When people tell me I remind them of Joni or Joan Baez, I know it comes from my mama, and deeper than that—Saskatchewan campfires and their late-night songs. And so somehow I also know that the entirety of singer-songwriter culture around the world, influenced so heavily by Joni, in a way owes its existence to humble farming communities who braved the Canadian cold and tried to build lives in a land that I sometimes can’t believe we survive on (for the record, though, I no longer do: I am happily settled among the palm trees in Southern California.)

All things have roots like this if we tease them out of their dark hiddenness.

But more on all of that another time.

I love this simple song below, passed on through my mother (along with others like “Puff, the Magic Dragon,'“ to which I distinctly remembering looking forlornly out the window, head on propped hand, when she sang it on family road trips).

The curtains in the backdrop of the video are symbolic to me, too—the videos I have from over the years are almost a journal of my life: all of the different places I landed and did battle in my life as an artist and someone fighting a lot of human challenges.

I am always fascinated by the way our lives unfold and how we can trace them back, back, back—back through the threads of our childhood and its wounds and joys, back through the lens of our own younger eyes—someone we know so intimately and yet somehow feel we now don’t know at all.

And through that all into further back-ness: Back through the stories of our parents, and the stories of theirs, and the meandering histories of ancestors, influenced by the unfolding of a grand narrative of human greatness, distress, confusion, triumph, suffering, loveliness—and song.

The idea that a particular melody finds its way into our lives is astounding if we think of it. We rarely do, of course. Of all of the songs of all of the human hearts, these ones find us just where we are.

And of all of the songs of human history, here one finds its way to you today.