Shade And Water

~ a love song to my mother, and to the rain*

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Tip: if you watch the video on your computer, please adjust the setting to 720p (click on gear icon, then quality), otherwise the video will be fuzzy. I've tried to fix the setting, but no luck. Thanks!

I’ve done it again—written another song that is too personal to be universally relatable—unless you were almost born on a boat, love the rain, hate to fly, and live too far away from your beloved parent.

While my mother was still living independently, we spent many hours on the phone everyday. Due to a decline in her health, most of the things that had enriched her life were no longer possible. Two years ago, I came up with the idea to write poems together. I hoped this activity would nourish her creative spirit. She was enthusiastic, although I wasn’t sure how long that would last. She surprised me—one poem led to another—and eight months later, we had written ten. The collection felt complete, so I made a booklet for her titled “Not Far From The Tree,” after our last poem. She loved it.

Weeks later, we decided to keep writing. "Water" was our latest muse based on a conversation we had about her growing up spending summers by the ocean, and my love of rainy days. I struggled to find a connection between the two, and we only got as far as the phrase “daughter of water.” I was sure this poem would never see the light of day. Not long after, life got in the way, and my mother had to stop living independently. We never wrote that poem.

I wrote this song instead.

Last autumn, as I worked on the melody and lyrics, practiced playing it, and began recording it, I felt like a fake. The last chorus and outro are about going home to see my Mom. I had no plans to go. I had many reasons not to! By January, my mother seemed to be declining, and within a week I was 32,000 feet in the air. That’s when my song became honest.

A note on the Bridge: The bridge, of course, is a play on the nursery rhyme about rain, but it’s deeper meaning depicts how painful it was for my mother and me to say goodbye at the end of our visits over the years. The lyrics say out loud what neither of us ever did. She never wanted to pull on my heartstrings, and I didn’t want to board a plane crying my eyes out.

Beginner notes:

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I think of my music videos as lab experiments. The recording assignment is always the same: try to sing in key, find harmonies when I can, and correct mistakes to the best of my ability. This time, I experimented with a “high strung” guitar (Nashville tuning). Keeping in time with myself was ridiculously hard. You’d think by now, I’d be eager to befriend a metronome!

Video: While I was visiting my mother on the east coast, I spent quiet evenings doodling on my tablet using the Procreate app. Eventually, I finished all the drawings I needed for the video. I waited until I returned to Oregon seven months later to start putting the pieces together.

Like all my projects, working on this one was mostly fun, sometimes frustrating, and kept me fixated until I finished. I still try too hard to make up for deficits of ability by correcting every little thing that bothers me, so it’s always a relief once I finally let a project go. Now that it's done, I'm actually looking forward to cleaning out my storage closet!

*The term pluviophile means a lover of rain, and refers to someone who finds joy and peace on rainy days. But I want to be clear. I’m talking about the “normal” kind of rain—misty, mossy, damp, cozy rain, not the disastrous, flooding rain that has caused heartbreaking trauma, destruction and loss

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