Music in times of change: The Point of Arrival from Carrie Newcomer

Endings and beginnings, change, balance -- or not --- of faith with uncertainty, ways all these things connect and intertwine: those are some of the threads which run through the songs Carrie Newcomer offers on her album The Point of Arrival.

Newcomer always looks for the story behind the story Through the music on each of her more than a dozen albums she has traced varying ways and times and places of finding the deeper tale, as she often names it, the sacred in the ordinary.

She does this with poetry and melody, with music that crosses between and braids folk and Americana told in a lovely alto voice with storyteller’s phrasing.

Newcomer’s considerations, both lyrically and in arrangement, are as likely to include dark as light. They are also more likely to ask and invite questions than to offer answers.

Dashes of humour and language which illuminates ideas in unexpected ways thread through the lyrics and music, too.

Learning to Sit With Not Knowing brings in the challenging aspects of doing just that, sitting with the uncertainty, the questioning, the waiting, which may make way for and blend into possibilities of hope and healing..

It is a constant in Newcomer’s writing that she says a lot by saying little. Often, she begins by working on ideas through writing a story, a poem, an essay, sometimes more than one, to have, as she describes it, a lot of language in hand. Language and idea meet as Newcomer distills them together into song..

Though her songs vary in subject and in sound, she’s been working on that aspect of her art across her career. At present that spans seventeen albums, as well as a respected presence as a spiritual thinker, and a collaboration with writer and teacher Parker J. Palmer on live presentations, a newsletter, and a podcast.

What sets her off exploring idea and language varies. Nature and landscape in their many aspects are constants. Newcomer is a native of Indiana. She continues to be based there, and draws directly and indirectly on ideas she comes in walks in Indiana woods near her home.

Snippets of conversation, or bits of things she’s read also spark ideas for her writing. Newcomer is a visual thinker, as well -- she has a degree in art -- so it’s natural that how things look and ideas from things she’s seen inspire her words and music as well.

Her choices of melody and arrangement evolve and change, too. She’s as adept lyrically and melodically at a lively song such as Impossible Until It’s Not as she is at reflective pieces with a touch of classical influence such as The Plumb Line or The Brink of Everything.

of these aspects find place through the songs on The Point of Arrival, and naturally enough, several aspects often come together within one song.

You will discover your own favourites in the eleven songs Newcomer offers on The Point of Arrival. Within them and through the course of how they are sequenced, you will find stories of endings and beginnings, of grieving, loss, hope, and resilience.

In addition to the song named above, listen out for Writing a Better Story. The title alone suggests all sorts of stories to find within the song. The Shelter of the Sky brings in nature to frame thoughtful ideas, as does the title song, The Point of Arrival. It’s Always Love and The Plumb Line find poetic and quite different ways to tell of what lasts and what may change.

Newcomer begins her music on The Point of Arrival with a piece called Learning to Sit with Not Knowing and draws things to a close with a song called The Brink of Everything. Those two song titles, suggest a journey, as do the stories, music, and language they contain.

Thoughtful questions, creative language, ideas that may seem at once familiar and new: all of these are present in Newcomer’s music. All are well worth your discovering, and repeated listening.

You may also wish to see
Carrie Newcomer’s website
Music & Mystery: conversation with Carrie Newcomer continues.
Signposts:Music of Hope, at Wandering Educators, which includes video of The Plumb Line
Laws of Motion, from Karine Polwart

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Another way to support: you could

If you enjoy what you are reading here, check out my newsletter at Substack for more stories about music, the people who make it and the places which inspire it.

While you are at Substack, Carrie Newcomer has a newsletter there too. It is called A Gathering of Spiris

Music and the new year

It is a time of year for resolutions, changes, and making lists. It is also often quite a shift from the warmth of connection and the quiet reflective days called forth by the major winter holidays. As you move into the work and life of the new month and this new year, music can serve as a companion and encouragement for exploration. Let it also be a reminder to keep the warmth and reflection and good things about the holidays alive in your heart and life as you take your next steps.

and to add to your plans for this new year, support live music. Go to a concert or a festival, and bring a friend or two along.

music to go along with these ideas
over at A Traveler’s Library in repsonse to a request for a story to fit in with a week of best of lists, I offer a list fo best music for journeys real and spiritual
you may also wish to see my choices for best music, 2012
and this music, silence, and spiritual journey

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Best music, 2012

Music is one of the strongest ways to connect: to connect across time, across space, with friends, and with strangers. At its best, music is conversation with listening, speaking, and silence all part of the mix. It holds the immediacy of the moment and the wisdom of memory as well as the possibilities of what is yet to be. At a time of year and in a world which now and again may seem rushed, music also holds a place of peace and silence, thought and reflection.

That is what each of these albums offers. You’ll find music with intricately created poetic words and music with no words at all, songs and tunes arising from heartfelt and soul felt connect to land and place, family and history, faith and hope.

In some cases, the links will take you to place where you may hear snippets of the music, and in others links will take you to an article about the album, with links within it which will let you hear the music. I would encourage you to explore these. The albums are not ranked in any order, each of them well worth you attention. Take a listen.

The spirit of the mountains fills Kathy Mattea’s recording Calling Me Home. It is a spirit which encompasses beauty of the natural world, hard life of making a home and a living in the mountains, faith, resilience, history, and unanswered questions. Country Grammy winner Mattea has in recent years been drawn to the songs of her native West Virginia and the surrounding coal country, and to finding her way in to helping these songs speak to a winder audience. She does that here, with notable tracks including Gone, Gonna Rise Again, Black Waters, and Now is the Cool of the Day.

As they have taken their music across the globe through three decades now, Altan have collaborated with artists ranging from Nashville’s country stars to Dublin’s classically trained musicians. For The Poison Glen/Gleann Nimhe though, they decided to bring the focus back home to Donegal, their home country in Ireland's far northwest. Led by fiery fiddling and graceful singing from Mairéad Ni Mhaonaigh, the members of Altan offer ensemble works by turns lively and thoughtful on music from the tradition, original compositions, and songs that have crossed the waters and back again from Ireland to North America. Look out especially for the New Rigged Ship set, Seolta Gala, and The Lily of the West.

For her album Through Wind and Rain Cathie Ryan brings music that both crosses bridges and creates them, bridges between Ireland and America, between past and present, through loss to resilience and hope. The daughter of parents who emigrated from Ireland to Michigan, Ryan has spent time as an adult living in both countries, and thinking about how their traditions connect and intertwine. For Through Wind and Rain she has chosen and written songs that contain touchstones from her own life, from finding the courage and a spark of humor to cary on after change and loss to encouraging a child to the lasting value of friendship. You will hear a thoughtful storyteller’s heart in Ryan's voice and in the music and arraignments she’s chosen. Look out especially for Mo Nion O, In the Wishing Well, and Fare Thee Well.

Carrie Newcomer is a storyteller with a gorgeous voice and and ear for a fine melody, as well. Her album Kindred Spirits is part retrospective and part new material. To choose the songs, Newcomer looked back over her work with a spiritual focus -- and as ever with Newcomer, spiritual means a broad idea of matters of faith. Even if you are well familiar with her songs, you will find her choices here and the way she has set them in context with each other illuminating. There are several new songs in the mix as well, including the opening track The Speed of Soul, in which Newcomer offers a mosaic of images forming a mediation on time and the spirit.

Rani Arbo and the men of daisy mayhem take matters of spirit into consideration for their recording  Some Bright Morning too. “The wind in the trees is a mighty good teacher/ old mother earth she’s a mighty good teacher,” the four sing in Joe Craven’s updated take on the spiritual Hear Jerusalem Moan with which they open the album. Fiddle, percussion mostly on a collection of items including cookie tins and old suitcases known as Drumship Enterprise, guitars, bass, banjo, and ukulele are the instruments they bring along with their trading of well honed harmony and lead parts on songs including East Virginia, Bridges, and Will Your House Be Blessed?

Cape Breton, a land of mountain, forest, water, and music, is the source from which singer Mary Jane Lamond and fiddle player Wendy MacIsaac draw their musical ideas. On their recording Seinn they offer music which comes from the deep Scottish Gaelic tradition of the island and newly composed material which honors this as well. From lively dance sets to soulful ballads to quiet reflection in song and tune, you’ll hear the heart of Cape Breton in the work of these women, and hear why it reaches across boundaries of language and place as well. Look out especially for The Blue Mountain’s Lullaby and Keeping Up with Calum.

The geography of Scotland itself is shaped by its islands, and it is to them that Fiona J MacKenzie turned to draw inspiration for her album Archipelago. Through gathering contemporary and traditional material and writing songs and melodies herself, MacKenzie visits Scottish islands from Shetland to to St. Kilda to Ailsa Craig in songs that evoke the relationship of land and sea known by island people.

Caroline Herring well knows how to evoke landscape and history with her songs, as well. In her album Camiila it is the American south which is her focus, from stories of the civil rights days in the title track to a visit to Washington DC in Maiden Voyage to the land as frame and companion for hard times in Summer Song.

Alistair Ogilvy tells the stories of his people and his home place with his music, too. He is a native speaker of Scots (think Robert Burns poems if you are wondering what that is) and like Herring -- indeed like all the musicians you see here -- he brings a storyteller’s gift to his work on his debut album, Leaves Sae Green.Irish musician Caitlin Nic Gabhann tells her stories through the steps of her feet in the dance and through her concertina. On her album Caitlin she offers sets from the tradition as well as tunes she has made herself. A touch both clear and melodic leads the way through reels including the Flying Column set and the Leeside Sessions set, the waltz Sunday’s Well and the air Cill Dheaglain.

Sarah McQuaid draws on her time spent growing up in the United States, living in Ireland, and her current home base in England to find sources for her songs on The Plum Tree and the Rose. It’s a varied collection, ranging from songs of love and change to a tale inspired by a moment of reflection in Derby Cathedral to another sparked by a visit to Hardwick Hall to a round on gratitude arising from recalling the American holiday of Thanksgiving while living elsewhere.

Nuala Kennedy brings a varied geography to her music as well. The flute player and singer is native to Louth, that land of legend in the east of Ireland. She’s lived long in Edinburgh and recently spent time in New York and in the north of Spain. All of these come into play in the songs as tunes and arrangements she creates on Noble Stranger. She offers intriguing takes on traditional songs as well. Look out for her versions of My Bonnie Labouring Boy and The Banks of the Roses.

Every year in October, the people of Cape Breton Island invite the world home to share their music and to explore the ties that twine that music with the traditions which it neighbors and those from across the oceans from which it springs. The brothers and sisters who make up The Barra MacNeils created ten days of musical collaboration that resulted in ten tracks on The Celtic Colours Sessions.This finds the Barras in their first French language song as they join up with Acadian singer Ron Bourgeois, celebrating the origins of Cape Breton and their family name as they partner with traditional singer Cathy-Ann MacPhee who grew up on the isle of Barra in Scotland’s Western Isles, tracing an Americana and banjo based connections with fellow Nova Scotian Old Man Luedecke, and making fine harmonies with members of another well known family band as they sing with Shay, Michael, Mary, and Frances Black from Ireland.

Take your time to explore this music, let the words and the melodies move you as they will, and listen from the resonances and connections and stories which run through the work of these diverse artists.. Explore other work of these musicians, as well, perhaps here along the Music Road for starters. There’s more to be learned and enjoyed from each of those whose names you see here.

you may also wish to see

listening to Christmas: Shannon Heaton, Cathie Ryan, Mary Black, Hanneke Cassel

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Music and Challenging Times

Music, especially the sorts of music we talk of here along the music road, is a good companion in times of sorrow as well as times of joy, in times of sorting things out as well as times of confidence moving forward. The music we talk about here is diverse at times, butit holds in common threads of hope and threads of reflection, in hard times and happy ones.

There are many sad things going on in the world, and in our day to day lives, as well -- and many ways joy is present, as well. Let us remember the joy and comfort music brings in all sort of circumstance.

















music to go along with these ideas

Music for a midsummer's day
listening through the changes
Carrie Newcomer: Before & After
Seven Stories
cathie ryan: the farthest wave

speaking of finding hope in troubled times, you may like this video, too, which is courtesy of Mary Allen, America's Inner Peace Coach


Photographs are from Ireland, Scotland, and Canada, and are copyrighted. Thank you for respecting this.

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Music, silence, and spiritual journey

Music and silence connect and intertwine and frame each other. They nurture each other, if you will.

I often find in my own creative practice that music is a doorway in to silence, that sort of interior silence which is both a spiritual discipline and a seedbed of creation.

Giving or receiving music, playing listening, that’s often true. I’ve a friend who when going though hard stuff in her life remarked that the only time she felt really clear and at peace was when she was on stage doing her music. Indeed, the music and the silence which goes along with it may be both a doorway and a home.

Musician Carrie Newcomer, whose work you may have met if you’ve walked here along the music road before, offers ideas on songwriting, spiritual practice, and why she goes to silent meeting for worship in this short video. Well worth your time.





you may also wish to see
Music Road: India to Indiana: Everything Is Everywhere from Carrie Newcomer
Music Road: Music of Ireland: Songs of the Scribe
Music Road: silence and music: Ireland
Music Road: rest in music
Music Road: Music, harvest, and time

A quick way to support Music Road: you could

If you enjoy what you are reading here, I've recently begun publishing an occasional newsletter at Substack with more stories about music, the people who make it, and the places which inspire it. Come visit and check it out!

India to Indiana: Everything Is Everywhere from Carrie Newcomer

“I think I have a very midwestern voice,” says Indiana based musician Carrie Newcomer. “ As I’ve gone on in my career, that voice has become stronger and deeper, and I’m happy with that.” Happy, in Newcomer’s case, includes being freer to explore ideas and questions which intrigue her. “ I think I’m really restless an artist,” she continues “ There are themes that I keep thinking about, ideas that fascinate me. Finding something sacred in an ordinary day, something extraordinary in the day to day, that’s a topic that keeps coming back to me. The idea of the moment, of being present in every moment of our lives, that’s another thing I keep coming back to.” Those ideas run through the work on Newcomer’s album Before & After

But what happens when you take that midwestern voice, that thirst for spiritual inquiry, the reflective nature of a writer and musician, and add in an unexpected month of teaching, touring, music making and experiencing the vast country that is India?

Newcomer’s album Everything is Everywhere is one result. On it, Newcomer brings in the gifts of master sarod players Amjad, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan along with her Indiana based musical friends Gary Walters on piano and Jim Brock on percussion. What these artists create together are songs which are distinctly in Newcomer’s artistic voice but with added colors and dimensions of what she learned and experienced in India.

The title track begins by evoking the sounds and tastes of a sunset on the Arabian sea and the colors of India, and moves to the sounds and sights and corn and beans of a farmer’s market in Indiana and a comforting bowl of soup shared with a friend, drawing these vivid journeys together with the reflection that

There is still so much work to do
Armloads of sorrow yes this is true
But I take heart when I despair
Miracles are everywhere

That interest in being in the moment comes through in a song called May We Be Released, which might be a prayer, might be an anthem, could be a comment on daily life, in India and in Indiana. As with all the songs on this album, the words are clearly Newcomer’s vision, set in melody and rhythm that both honor and extend her ideas. The sarod is a stringed instrument from India capable of great emotional depth and resonance, to which the Khans bring centuries of family immersion in playing classical Indian music and thinking about the connections among music and spirit. That is a shared connection that made it seem right to follow up an afternoon of sharing music in India with a deeper collaboration as Newcomer began to write the songs which would come out of her time in the country.

Not that she went to India seeking inspiration for a new album: Newcomer was in the midst of finishing up work on Before and After and scheduling tour dates to support it when the call came from a family friend inviting her to be a artist in residence during a week focusing on peace and justice at an international school in New Delhi. Then, the American Center learned of her invitation and started talking with Newcomer about visiting other places in India as a cultural ambassador in a program sponsored by the US State Department. All of this was coming up in a short window of time around which she had intense work planned “but I thought, I’m not going to say No! I’m not going to India! I’ll make this work,” Newcomer says. She had a question for the officials, too. “I have to say my first thought was: do you know what I do? This is
the state department, right? and I’m an activist folk singer type...” As it turned out the people at the American Center and the American Embassy in India did know. “The answer came back, and it was beautiful,” Newcomer recalls. “They said, we’re looking for music that builds bridges. There’s plenty enough walls out there, we’re looking for music that builds bridges, and your music does that.”

So she went, for what would prove an intense and moving month. “During the day, I’d be visiting schools and community service organizations, sometimes two and three in a day, and then in the evening give concerts,” she said. “And they sent me all over the place! I was in Kolkata, I was in Delhi, I was in Bengal, I was in the central part, I was in the very south, I was in Chennai, I was in Mumbai. India is a huge country, and just like the United States, different parts all have different foods, customs, dress, politics. It was an amazing experience. It was a life changing experience, and one I think I’ll be processing for a long time.”

Newcomer brought with her her own songs of family, the search for peace, reflection on the spiritual in the everyday, “and I found when I sang about those things, about grief, about family, about love, that the thread pulled through. The thread of connection pulled through. I have a song called Geodes, about Indiana rocks. It’s also about finding the shining heart of things, and that connected.” She also found listening to be part of her work.


“I’d go into these situations asking asking myself how can I serve? What am I here to give? and sometimes it was just to bear witness. They need to be heard, they need me to hear them and take that hearing and seeing them on, “ she said. She recalled a time when she’d been to a home for women and girls who were making new lives after difficult circumstances. “They sang songs to me in Hindi, and then they sang We Shall Overcome to me in Hindi and I sang it back to them in English, and we sang together. And I cried! I think I wept so much they were probably saying what is it with this American woman, she weeps, she sings, she weeps --”
Newcomer says, laughing. “But I think part of the work of the artist is to bear witness, too.”

That is part of what is going on in Everything Is Everywhere as well. With the music on it, from the vivid images in the title track to a song about forgiveness inspired by a poem from American poet Mary Oliver to an Indian raga from the Khans to consideration of love, hope and mystery wrapped in images of the everyday in I Believe, what Newcomer offers is an unfolding, a celebration, and a different way of seeing things in the world that connect us, across language and country and time and faith. Music that builds bridges, indeed.







Proceeds from Everything Is Everywhere will go to benefit the Interfaith Hunger Initiative, a program which works to end childhood hunger in Indiana and overseas.



photograph of Carrie Newcomer by Kerry Dexter. Thank you for respecting copyright.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Carrie Newcomer: Before & After
Music Road: season of change: music for autumn
Music Road: Songs of the Immigrants

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

music and mystery

Does music matter in times like these?

Yes.
That’s a good part of the reason I started writing Music Road, and a good part of the reason I began walking the music road myself long years back. Music is a connector, a conversation, a way of thinking about the world, a source of inspiration and imagination, and of healing. It is also a way to think about the questions of life. It is a way to live the questions. It is a way to live in the mysteries.

If thinking about music this way is unfamiliar to you, I encourage you to look around through the nearly five years worth of posts here at Music Road, to read about the musicians and ideas I introduce you to, and to listen to the music. Take your time with all of that. You’re very welcome.

If you are concerned about this hurting world at this moment, I’d encourage you to visit the web sites of the Red Cross and the Mercy Corps. Their people -- and those of many other fine groups -- are doing work of healing across the world and quite likely not that far from you, as well.

Music to go along with these ideas, and to get you started on your explorations

Music Road: Carrie Newcomer: Before & After
Music Road: Cathie Ryan: Songwriter
Music Road: music and hope: Derry
Music Road: Road Trip Music in Mississippi
Music Road: Julie Fowlis:Uam

-->If you'd like to support my creative work at Music Road,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

Carrie Newcomer: Before & After

Before & After

“We remember moments,” says Carrie Newcomer. That’s the idea she was thinking about as she chose which of her songs to put on her latest album. It’s an idea that plays out in graceful, reflective, sometimes funny, and often surprising ways over the course of the thirteen tracks on Before & After.

Do No Harm, for example, inspired by a story by Scott Russell Sanders and drawn from an event in history, finds the central characters all making choices in the space of a moment’s time that echo down through lifetimes. I Do Not Know Its Name is grounded in the present moment by images of the juice of peaches running down your chin or the joy of a spontaneous song from a stranger, and anchored in mystery by another stranger’s enigmatic advice about a poem and the flash of something moving in the waters just beyond reach.

As thinker, poet, and musician, Newcomer often walks the territory of mystery, especially those places where mystery intersects with the everyday. In the title track, Before & After, she illuminates moments of circumstance and emotion when nothing is ever quite the same after they’ve happened, from a hit and run on the highway to Jacob’s dream of an angel. Coy Dogs goes deep into the risks and costs of the choice, chance, and change, while Hush is a passionate affirmation of trust in the power of love however unknowable the circumstance. A Small Flashlight finds the singer considering trust from another point of view. I Wish I May I Wish I Might is a gentle and amusing celebration of the fun and family and home, framed in quick vignettes of county fairs of Newcomer’s native Indiana, and A Crash of Rhinoceros is just plain funny -- though you might take away a deeper idea or two from that, too, as you finish laughing.

Musically, Newcomer goes to places both direct and complex. She’s always had a good hand at writing melodies that naturally support the words, ideas, and poetry of her lyrics, and as producer (she co produced this with David Weber, with whom she’s worked on several recordings) she understands how to frame her warm and conversational alto in a way that respects both the music and the poetry of her songs. Coy Dogs, for example, begins with a bass figure that immediately suggests both the dark and light of the song, while I Meant to Do My Work Today is framed in notes which, in very subtle fashion, suggest the ticking of a clock. “I had such great musicians to work with on this album,” Newcomer says. “They’re people who if you want a lot of notes, they can give you a lot of notes. They also know that sometimes what you don’t say is as important as what you do.” Newcomer plays guitar and bouzouki on the album, and Mary Chapin Carpenter, Michael White, and Krista Detor each add backing vocals on one song. Among others who join in are Byron House on electric and upright bass, Gary Waters on keyboards, and Mary Gaines on cello.

What holds at the center of it all, though, is the power and poetry of Newcomer’s ideas, and her musicality in sharing them . There’s a lot going on in this album -- in each song, actually. As ever, Newcomer asks good questions with her music, and invites you to consider what your own answers to those questions may be.

We live our lives from then until now
by the mercies received
or the mark upon our brow
To my heart I’ll collect
what the four winds will scatter
And frame my life by before and after

from Before & After
copyright 2009 Carrie Newcomer Music

you may also want to see
Carrie Newcomer: faith and laughter
Wilderness Plots: the dvd
late summer: two for the road

look for more from Carrie Newcomer about the making of Before & After, and her recent travels, which have included concerts in India, coming up in print in the folk and world music magazine Dirty Linen, and here along the music road as well.

A way to support Music Road: you could

If you enjoy what you are reading here, I've recently begun publishing an occasional newsletter at Substack with more stories about music, the people who make it, and the places which inspire it. Come visit and check it out! and while you are there, look for Carrie Newcomer's Substack called A Gathering of Spirits, too.

Creative practice: listening

The band Better Than Ezra is coming out with a single called Just One More Day, arising from band members’ times of losing loved ones and wishing for more time to say things to them.

Though I've not yet heard the song, I tend to look in a different direction. In such a circumstance, I’d rather listen. Sometimes, I’ve been granted the grace to do so.

Some of both, I suppose, might be a good answer. What do you think?

music to go along with these ideas
Music Road: creative practice: healing

Music Road: creative practice: winter thoughts

Music Road: listening through the changes

-->If you'd like to support my creative work,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.

creative practice: thanksgiving

At times, it’s challenging to get to the focused place of creative practice when the world, both in large scale and in day to day life, seems to be calling for attention in so many ways,p ositive hopeful things, and difficult, hard ones both. Give the gift that only you can give. That idea makes a good center point. Though I’ve often had -- am having -- challenging times in making that work to make living, still it is what being an artist is about, and it is what other sorts of vocations are about too.

In the United States this week we celebrate Thanksgiving, a remembrance, among other things, of a time when communities and individuals cared for each other, and when, remembering that, a broken nation took a stand for hope.

Music is and has been and will be a way to connect, to create and to think about all these things. Especially at this Thanksgiving, I offer thanks to all the musicians you've met here, and those who help them out at home and along the road. I look forward to many more shared journeys.

for more on vocation, you may want to see Parker Palmer’s book
A Hidden Wholeness




and for music to go along with these ideas
Music Road: now playing: cathie ryan: the farthest wave

Music Road: now playing: Carrie Newcomer: The Geography of Light

Music Road: Dual: Julie Fowlis & Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh