Written by Erika Lundahl
Photos by Max Shaw Photography
"LADY BE"
By Erika Lundahl
www.erikalundahl.com
www.patreon.com/erikalundahl
Video recorded & mixed by Doug Indrick at Rolling Crone Records
Edited by Erika Lundahl
Recorded at Hatch Workshop
Stockton, CA
Erika on the inspiration behind "Lady Be"
This song is a call to solitude--and especially to feminine solitude.
I wrote it when I was 20, trying to find grounding after feeling my internal world fractured by an inability to say a simple word: No. No. No.
I need to be by myself.
Go away.
I need to learn to be whole. By myself.
No.
No was a word that I learned late in life. It came out hard and laboring. It was a talisman that I searched for and ran from. It terrified me. It was especially difficult to say to men. Men asked for parts of me and I knew—but didn’t know well enough—that I couldn’t give to them.
This song is also for the complicated female friendships that form and dissolve on the road to No, where kinship is grounded in shared attempts at subversion of unwanted desire. Camaraderie built from the misadventures and the pains we bring unto ourselves and to each other in our stumbling to know the sacred boundaries of our bodies and of our inner life, and the lines we cannot allow others to cross within us.
Lastly, the song was inspired by a poem by Emily Dickenson, which rang with such truth at the time I read it that it lives on my heart forever more:
Much Madness is Divinest Sense
Much Madness is divinest Sense-
To a discerning Eye-
Much Sense-the starkest Madness-
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail-
Assent- and you are sane
Demur- you’re straightway dangerous-
And handled with a Chain-
Thank you for listening.
Artist Bio
Erika Lundahl is a musician, writer and activist who lives on stolen Duwamish Lands in Seattle, WA. She employs her classically trained voice and distinctive "tapping" guitar style to create an enveloping, atmospheric musical space. Heart forward, her original lyrics weave in wisdom and words of women poets of past eras such as Sappho and Edna St. Vincent Millay, addressing personal, social and environmental issues with poignant and powerful imagery. She is also co-owner of Rolling Crone Records and a community organizer for environmental justice issues. Integration is her word of the year- she is in search for what it means to integrate the personal, political in pursuit of artistic expression and beauty.
Originally from the Willamette Valley of Oregon, she moved to the urban wilderness of Seattle in late 2013. Her band Animals of Grace's debut album “Songs of Shattering,” released in 2015 on Rolling Crone Records was inspired by the poetry of Edna St. Millay and made it's debut onto CMJ's top 200 albums of college radio in March 2016. She released a second album under Animals of Grace "Brambles" in 2016.
Her recent live album Aim for the Center exhibits the moving storytelling and talented performance that Erika is known for. She just recorded a live in-studio album at London Bridge Studios that will be out in Winter 2018. She is a artist on the Patreon platform, which is where she releases behind the scenes releases, video and poetry for her community. Check it out here.
"Lundahl’s impressively strong and talented vocals take on both an elegiac and a tender quality." –Keith Hedad, Record Crates United
“..Their live performance locked us in awe with Erika’s beautifully clear voice….Watching her fingers play that 12-string was mesmerizing as she rapidly switched between tapping, drumming and finger picking” - Norm Johnson, host of Concerts in the Woods Series
Links to Music & Upcoming Shows:
www.patreon.com/erikalundahl
www.erikalundahl.com
https://erikalundahl.bandcamp.com
also find Erika's music on Spotify, or wherever music is sold.
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