CERES & CALYPSO IN THE DEEP TIME

A week before I would travel to Maine to visit Bates College, I woke up thinking that I should make a soundtrack for the drive. Bates houses the correspondence of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman. I had been deeply moved by their published letters and couldn’t wait to hold the original letters for the first time. I would also make a visit to Southport Island, where Carson and Freeman shared their summers together. I knew this trip would be remarkably meaningful for me and I wanted the companionship of music that expressed both the expansiveness and intimacy of the experience. I wondered if anyone had composed music related to Rachel Carson’s books.

I discovered an album by Candy Claws titled In the Dream of the Sea Life, a musical companion to Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. My local independent record store encouraged me to contact the band directly. I wrote to the band and explained that I was writing a collection of poems inspired by Rachel Carson’s and Dorothy Freeman’s letters and that The Sea Around Us was the book that made it possible for Carson to purchase her summer cottage on Southport, which led to her meeting Freeman. Ryan Hover sent a note in return and In the Dream of the Sea Life arrived the day before I left for Maine.

Two months later, I initiated a correspondence with Ryan about creative process and how we find a subject for our music and writing. This correspondence resulted in an invitation from the band to write the lyrics for the next Candy Claws album. Ryan shared with me narrative details, a structural concept and ten rough mixes. The story would take place during the Mesozoic Era and there would be 12 songs total with 4 songs representing each of the 3 time periods: Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.

I listened to the rough mixes, read and looked at dozens of children’s books about dinosaurs and the Mesozoic Era, studied visual representations of Mesozoic landscapes, listened to recordings of recreated dinosaur sounds and watched documentaries. To create a sense of continuity with the band’s previous two albums, early in the process I hand wrote—and read every morning—the lyrics from In the Dream of the Sea Life and Hidden Lands. Midway through the writing process, Ryan had the idea to give each song two titles, one for the music and one for the lyrics, to emphasize our collaboration. Rather than designate a chorus, I left it open for the band to let the chorus for each song become clear while in the studio.

Listen to the album