I’ve been running around and sitting in one place, both lately. Zepparella shows, and then coming home glued to different creative projects I’m working on. Drum practice has been fun in a brand new way, songwriting is requiring a patience and deep dive that is both delicious and a bit terrifying, and another writing project has been sort of all-consuming and pure fun.
I drove down from Portland on Sunday after a few shows and the Old Man had a killer documentary waiting for me, “Milford Graves: Full Mantis.” To call Graves a drummer is to sell him short, as he was a genius, visionary, multi-disciplinarian, professor. Luckily, the Old Man has been collecting Graves albums for a while, so we’re in a lovely exploration of the music as well. Look up the doc if you haven’t caught it yet. I found it endlessly inspirational, and his explanation of what it is to swing was… chef’s kiss.
On the 10 hour drive on Sunday, I spent some time in quiet, connecting to that field of information I seem to be able to connect to that reaches up into that river of creative flow that lives just above my head. I suddenly got the impulse to listen to some of my earlier albums, the first Clementine album, “Conversation with Francis Bakin” from 2008, the EP from a short-lived rock group The Solid, “Arrivals and Departures,” the first Stars Turn Me On album, “Goldrush” from 2012, and then the album that remixed songs from those records and added something new, “The Collection” from 2014.
I had taken these songs off the internet, intending to re-release them eventually. I’ve been dragging my feet because these are early works, and when I thought of the songs I could really only think of all the things I had an issue with or felt I had moved past: the quality of the vocal, the quality of songwriting, etc.
When I listened though, they didn’t bother me in the way I thought they would. Albums are a snapshot of time, and in the songs I heard where I was then, and the lessons I was learning that brought me to today. It seemed valid to let them live in the world again, in this time and space where I’m a bit more refined and still on a constantly opening musical path.
A plan formulated to put them back up online, and release them song by song, with a blog post about the song and what was happening at the time it was written. There are a bunch of songs, so this will keep me busy for a while.
Stay tuned for that! The records will be showing up on Bandcamp soon, or just wait for the individual songs and stories and videos, one by one.
All that to say, you’re going to start getting more of these blog posts soon. Thank you for your patience during this relative lull of posting. Hope to see you at a Zepparella show soon!
xo Clementine
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