July 13 was the ten-year anniversary of my first album, Bone Nest!
To honor the occasion, I spent two weeks walking back through the stories behind the songs and the making of the album over on social media. I’ll include the stories here too for posterity : )
Looking for Song Lyrics? Find them here >>
Track One: Honey
I wrote this song in the room pictured, a lovely space perched above a Seattle P-Patch garden in a rambunctious and musical community home that a few friends and I started in our late teens. This is where I picked up a guitar for the first time, learned some chords from a housemate, and began to write songs. I loved to sit in this chair by the window with my guitar and gaze out on all the plants… or climb out the window onto the roof to see the stars and breathe in the crisp air of early adult freedom.
The song “Honey,” probably the third or fourth song I ever wrote, started as a bit of a joke, written in dramatic jest as I hung out one morning with a man I was involved with at the time… but I expanded it over the year or two that followed and eventually wrote the last verses to honor the ending of that relationship. My dear friend and original band-mate of Wren, @artsarts, took these first “official” Wren photos for me as my three years in the community house were coming to an end so that I could have a memory of the first place songs came to me. I’m so grateful to have a timestamp of this impactful time. In the background, you can see some of the products of that era’s special interest: canning fruit. My only sweetener was honey : )
Track Two: Giant Shoes
I wrote this song the summer I finished college. It was the depths of the recession and I’d had no success finding a “traditional” job after graduation, so I instead threw myself into a self-designed “Laura school” to discover who I was outside of academia. I worked as a public radio host, edited a community justice publication, studied permaculture, learned guitar, and began examining the ways I let fear hold me back from what I really wanted in life. This song feels ripe with the emotion of that period but still holds lessons for me even today. For those curious, the title comes from some striking rock formations I admired while passing through Idaho on a road trip that summer. It was the beginning of a fascination with stones that becomes quite apparent in my later work ; )
As the photos from that road trip live on a hard-drive in a distant garage—and because this song features the beautiful contributions of @britt_c_new on fiddle and @artsarts on percussion & harmonies— today I want to revisit the recording process of Bone Nest. The album was recorded in a backyard studio in Ravenna, Seattle. Hans Brehmer, the engineer, was my Spanish student, so I was able to exchange lessons for some of the recording time. I’d never done anything like this before and was terrified! I practiced hours and hours a day leading up to recording because we planned to capture everything live in single takes without a metronome (I like to think the tempo on this album “breathes” lol). While one of us was occasionally stationed in an isolation booth to give us more editing control, 99% of this album was recorded as live single-takes with two of us elbow-to-elbow in this tiny room. It was intimate, thrilling, low-key, and mind-blowing. I fell in love with the recording process and it remains one of my favorite parts of making music.
The last few pictures in this reel are from a show the three of us played at the San Juan County Fair, the only time this album was performed live in the exact musical configuration as what you hear on the album. The release show is a tale for a different day…
Track Three: Juggling Boy
I wrote this song during my year living in Galicia, Spain. My job teaching English was in the city (Vigo), but I was able to compress my work schedule to M-W so that I could spent Thu-Sun in the countryside. After months of searching, via WWOOF I discovered a beautiful, remote farm where I could continue my permaculture studies. Each Thursday, I walked a mile from my home in Vigo with my backpack and guitar, took a 30-minute bus-ride, walked another half mile, and then took a 3-4 hour train ride from the coast to the interior of Galicia. On Sundays, I reversed the process. It was exhausting working almost every day but the train ride along the Miño river was my weekly writing/dreaming time and the lush landscape blossomed in me a love for the place that fueled me through the worst manual labor.
A suite of travelers passed through the farm, so I met many lovely people from all around the world. One of them was a circus arts teacher. I never thought I could learn to juggle—I’d tried in gym class before without any success. Like anything, it turns out juggling can be broken down into a series of smaller motions, which when put together, produce the desired outcome. With some borrowed balls, I practiced the movements for days on the beach back in Vigo (in sand, balls cannot travel far when you drop them!)…and miraculously, one day the pieces clicked together and I could juggle! It was true magic.
Early that spring, we had built a living willow hut, and around the time I learned to juggle it was in full bloom. I don’t have pictures of it completely leafed out, but it became a cool, private sanctuary. In this reel, you can watch spring come to life on the farm, and at the end, see the exact place I composed the song, on the stoop of the cottage in the oak forest I was lucky enough to call my own for a few sweet months. The rest of the story is told in the song : )
Track Four: Seal Barnacle
“Seal Barnacle” is the very first song I ever wrote! It was inspired, in part, by an impromptu trip to an island in a magical blue bus with a gaggle of touring musicians. I was just there to be among friends and watch the show, guitar newbie that I was, but I think a part of me knew there was something about their vocation that was also for me. We stayed in an old wooden house above the sea; fir tips were sprouting and wild roses threaded through the grass. A long wooden dock stretched out over the ocean, and as we stood there scanning the horizon for seals or whales, we saw movement right under our feet: a seal beneath our dock. So much of what I’d been looking for far away from myself was right beside me, inside of me, ready to be claimed.
Videographer Rob Edmondson (@robert_brian_media) and I shared a voice teacher and met one evening after a recital. Do you want me to make you a music video? he asked. I’d never even considered such a thing and was intrigued. Over the next year, we met in parks around Seattle, gradually piecing together a video for “Seal Barnacle. We were just starting our careers and it was a learning process for both of us. We were so lucky to meet up at that auspicious moment and I’m so proud of the video he made for this song. We had so much fun making it! Thank you again, Rob, for this stunning video and your generous support of my music all these years!
Track Five: Winter Ground
This is probably one of the least-listened-to Wren tracks of all time but it is one of the closest to my heart. I’m not sure why, but over the years this song has continued to hold so much emotional resonance for me. I wrote it during a liminal time as I was preparing to leave my life in Seattle for a job in Spain. I didn’t know what was ahead of me and knew I needed a big change, but was mourning the post-college chapter of community, music, nature immersion, and new love that had birthed my music and set me on a path nothing like I had imagined in my previous era of scholarly devotion.
That summer, I had spent weeks in the wilderness at a nature skills gathering in Colorado and then at my Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course in the Methow Valley. It was the beginning of an eye-opening chapter for me in which the natural world that I had long pictured as animate in my imagination became animate to me on a physical, sensual, tactile plane. I was studying plants and their life cyles, making medicines that I didn’t know would be crucial to my healing in years to come, and experiencing the living, breathing world in a way that connected me to a tapestry greater than myself. When I listen to this song now, the feeling of that early period of discovery comes back to me.
This photo was taken at my PDC in summer 2010 during a talent show. It was the first time I had performed any of my music to people other than friends and family, and the first time I realized my music held something for others, too.
Track Six: Fairies
Thanks to my decision to use the word “congeal” in these lyrics, this is the song I’ve probably received the most (loving) teasing for over the years… Naturally, I decided that it’s a great idea to put the lyrics out there for all the world to see ; )
Awkward though my choice of language may be… I think it’s perfectly discordant for the subject matter at hand. I still come back to this song often when the future refuses to solidify (I’ll admit, I was humming it yesterday). My life is still a wild horse that refuses gentling or a singular direction… and maybe that’s for the best.
Growing up usually requires a certain amount of disillusionment. While I must admit that the sadness of leaving childhood behind is the emotional driver of this song, I’m glad to report that the fairies are alive and well! Still working on kissing that elbow, though.
Track Seven: Last September
I wrote this song in the fall of 2010, shortly after arriving in Vigo, Spain where I would teach for the next school year. In Galicia, I quickly realized that despite urbanization and globalization, the old ways were still alive. My new friends and colleagues generously introduced me to the seasonal patterns of Galician culture, from the magosto (chestnut harvest) to the traditional Galician language that had endured despite decades of oppression. I was awestruck and heartbroken simultaneously. This was the first time I really felt the loss of coming from a people who had abandoned most of their cultural traditions and ancestral languages for survival, power, and voluntary assimilation into the American project. This song was born from my grief about the state of the world and the violence of empire, colonization, and extractive economies… and this one holds true today. I hope we humans can learn to protect what is most precious before even more is lost.
Track Eight: Sword in the Stone
I wrote this song on the beach by my home in Vigo, Spain during my year teaching abroad. After weeks staying with a generous couch-surfing host (who went on to become one of my closest friends in Spain), and then a month living in an apartment in Bouzas, an incorporated fishing town of Vigo, I finally found what I was looking for: a place where I could walk out of my home barefoot ; ) The ‘pension house’ of sorts was on the outskirts of the city in the neighborhood of Coruxo, known for its proximity to some of the most beautiful beaches of Vigo. Located on a deep inlet/fjord, the beaches are sandy and the water is warm (in summer), and the hillsides were covered with climbing wild clematis and nasturtiums. From a small promontory behind my house, I harvested wild greens and stuffed my face with edible flowers. In the evenings after teaching, I took my guitar and walked two blocks, crossed the road, and then balance-beamed down a narrow cement divider to reach the beach. My home was perched above the Miño river; when the ocean tide was high, it rushed back into the river, making it appear to flow backwards.
It was a beautiful, transformative, and wrenchingly difficult year. I made wonderful new friends but was still frequently lonely and homesick. The ocean and rocks and shells and the solitary heron I met on the beach each night became my companions, as did my guitar. I had done the hard thing—moved away from home, challenged myself to new a job—and the success of the venture was bittersweet, a mix of pleasurable growth and heartache. I still love this song because, at least for me, it captures the feeling of liminality and in-between of those special times in life when opposite forces come together, like the river and the sea.
Track Nine: Lark
Though my memories of writing the song “Lark” are quite fuzzy, what I can say is that Plato’s allegory of the cave was a big inspiration as I tied together the images of this song. (Thank you, Sophie’s World!). Around this time I was also training to be a gardening mentor, studying the role of our food systems on climate change, and feeling a lot of grief about the state of the world. It’s a song that I still turn to when I lose hope and need the seeds of melody to carry me forward.
Track Ten: Whirlpool
It’s the Ten-Year Anniversary of Bone Nest! There’s only one song left to go, which I’ll post about later this evening… but in the meantime, here is a short reel that takes you through the development of Bone Nest’s visual identity plus a few pictures from the release show at Seattle’s Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater!
Artist Taylor Stimpson and I worked together on a time crunch, as I was trying to have the CDs printed by Folklife in May 2012. Due to a series of life mishaps, including am email inbox fiasco in which I didn’t receive emails from the venues I contacted for the release show until almost a year later… the release didn’t officially happen until July 13, 2013!
I knew I wanted the CD art to feel dreamy and earthy; after all, the title of the album was inspired by a dream I had of birds constructing a bone nest (discussed in more detail in this video). Taylor got to work drawing sketches, and around the same time, he discovered an absolutely gorgeous bird’s nest. We took a bunch of pictures, thinking they might appear in the album artwork, but we ended up preferring an illustrated approach, so the pictures of me holding the nest we took at Magnuson Park in Seattle became inspiration for the interior album artwork (see reel).
My inner idealist always has trouble with the process of transferring visions to reality… but I’m so happy with how this album turned out. The release show, though a year late, was such a warm and nurturing experience of feeling held by community.
Track Eleven: Rocks & Bones
Well friends, we have come to the end of the Bone Nest extravaganza! I’m sending so much gratitude to those of you who joined along in revisiting this old work that still holds medicine for the “now.” I undertook this celebration primarily for myself and my own sense of personal honoring and history, but getting to share it with you was a massive treat and filled my cup more than you know!
The final track of this album, “Rocks & Bones,” continues to be very dear to me. I have such a vivid memory of writing it while sitting on an old stone wall on the farm in Galicia, Spain, on the edge of the red current bush terrace where we harvested berries in June to make into juices and jams. Records of the property go back many hundreds of years, so I remember considering that I’d never know if I was perched on a 50-year-old wall or the bones of a much more ancient structure. I felt deliciously temporary and oh-so-alive.
While working on the farm, I lived closer to the seasonal patterns of life than I ever had before. I was struck, even then at age 22, by the way the patterns of my life spiraled around again and again, lessons returning to be lived in new ways with each continued turn of the wheel. While some might have found that discouraging, to me it felt oddly comforting. I felt a sense of purpose greater than myself, and that my feet were making a tiny, meaningful trail that looped in circles, ever closer to the soulful, breathing center of life.
I took this self portrait inside the cabin I lived in that spring, shortly before leaving Spain for a summer in Ireland. The rustic cabin was perched on a hillside in an oak forest with a wall of windows that gazed out over the pastures. It was the first home I truly fell in love with, my every sense nourished by the smell of wood and forest and candlelight. The cabin burned down a few years later, so I’m grateful to have this small memory of the time that inspired this song.