One way to start a song is to read a paragraph from any book. Catch yourself off guard by trying to improvise right away based on the words you’ve just read. Think of the paragraph as a ball of yarn. Pull yarn from it. Play with it, roll it around, tug at the tangly parts, roll it back up […]

I’ve always been fascinated by stories about women-loving-women throughout history. How/when/where have these relationships and identities existed during different eras and across cultures? Narrowing my focus to two women in 1940’s New York, I explored my interest by writing some historical fiction on the topic. Here’s a 2-minute trailer for “The Ballad of Madelyne & […]

VIDEO AND LYRICS BELOW Americana Highways hosted the premier of our new video for “Winter Fuel (Good King Wenceslas Revisited)”. Please find Melissa Clarke’s review below along with the video and lyrics to follow. Thank you, San Francisco – the people, the voices, and the stories – for collaborating on this winter offering. Americana Highways is […]

Sometimes when I’m seeking inspiration for a song, I turn to a random page in a book and just start singing what I see, read or feel. It’s a way of prompting a new song without overthinking what I’m going to write.  Books are best when circulated, but recently the Little Free Library (a cabinet used for free exchange […]

I haven’t seen a lot of films lately, let alone animated ones, so when I watched En Canto with my kids recently I was surprised by the vividness of . . . everything! The character Luisa got my attention the most.