Thanks for sharing Alela. Your words make me go back to my youth. And I realize how life with your family, back then considered ordinary and mundane, now becomes precious memories. The way you describe those memories in your songs makes them real gems.
I still have similar dreams about my grandparents’ house, they sold it when I was ten and I struggled to accept it (it was an incredible house, we were very lucky). I still visit it in my dreams, and until a few years ago this scenario when the new owners discover me was recurrent. I had never read about this kind of dreams, I loved reading you ! And the story about the actual visit of the actual house is beautiful
Thanks for writing this. I've had on and off dreams of trespassing my family home since I sold it. In the dreams I am always there to spend the night and then I suddenly realize (with horror) that it was not mine anymore and that I have actually trespassed and that the new owners might come any minute(and of course, they almost always do). I had such a visceral reaction reading about your actual visit and the timing of the new owner appearing.
Alela. I was in tears reading this. I am so glad you managed to go back and visit briefly. Especially with your daughter. I took my grandchildren back to my childhood home. We lived out bush, so I just rocked up to the house and introduced myself. Lovely people, who invited us to stay for dinner and we shared stories about 'our' home. On another note. Hope you get back to Australia one day. Cheers.
I found this incredibly moving Alela. We each have our stories of childhood and coming-of-age in place. I am still haunted in my dreams by the perceived utopia of the rental house in the Blue Mountains that was the last in a long line of rentals my mother moved us to. It’s where I spent my whole teens and for some reason, it’s the house that will always be the place of safety and peace in my mind. Every now and then I scan the real estate websites to look at the houses I’ve lived in, and do a “virtual” trespass. I’m so glad for you that you had the guts to actually go in there with your daughter. What a special moment.
This was so beautifully written, thank you so much for sharing.
Despite the heartbreak of its end it sounds and looks like a beautiful upbringing.
My parents divorced at a similar age, the year before my last of high school and my mom started a new life with a new man and I wasnt a part of it at all.
If you feel like it, you should write about your year in San Fransisco, I for one would have loved to hear about it.
Thanks Alela for all your beautiful words and songs.
Really... There's really a story behind every song. I'll listen to them differently now, understanding the meaning and the feeling behind every word. Thanks so much for this! Reading and listening at the same time was magic.
This is a fascinating and moving account. For me, Looking Glass is your best album since To Be Still, and Dream A River is the best track. The arrangement with the softly padding or panting strings gently offsetting the unhurried beat plus the higher vocal register in the chorus, with its piercingly cheerful "hook" line, make it the one I commune with most, for its eerie compassion - as in the Hopkins sonnet "My own heart let me more have pity on".
In recent years I have had some extraordinary dreams full of powerful meaning which this brief entry provides no space to describe and explore. The house I was born in and grew up in for two decades is still there in outer London. These days it is possible to look at property sites online and with luck arrive at a photo of it, and info on its most recent sale price. About 30 years ago I went to look at it - walked down the short cul-de-sac with the little circular island at the bottom, and briefly stood there. As in the Tennyson line in Tears Idle Tears - "so sad, so strange, the days that are no more" - it was calmly discomfiting. I don't see myself ever doing it again. Sometimes in dreams I am in scenarios which I detect on waking to be from there, often overlapping and merging and blurring with my (much) later life experiences but still real, as if the early distant formative events are operating as an understudy or prompter in the theatre of life which I now move and breathe and act in.
I think as a singer songwriter you are good at this side of life experience. I once listened to Forest Parade online and I talk about it somewhere in my book Scrapbook Scriptures: Alela Diane In My Listening Life, which I began writing in 2018. This was not premeditated and has no plan - I did not intend to start doing it at all but it emerged as a project one day which builds up in discrete "modules" of varying lengths, not a logical prescribed development of successive chapters serving a fixed, teleological objective. This year I am quietly carefully reading through the whole thing so far to study what I am saying in it, all 10 modules. Module 8 called Allelulia Alela is perhaps the strongest, with its departure point being a comment I heard once on the radio in a discussion of music - someone said dismissively of music that preceded Bach-Mozart-Beethoven et al becoming more popular, "oh, they just like the sound of it", a foolishly elitist attitude I feel called to witness against. I talk about Cold Moon and describe your voice in my "listening life" alongside Gaelic singer Christine Primrose and the Carter Family singer Sarah Carter and Kathleen Ferrier singing "English Songs".
The other comments to your post below are all very relevant and encouraging. I would be able to do more of the above as a full paid member of ET, but as already stated several times, the technology has obstructed me by declining my card for payment with no justification, so until you tell me this has been fixed, that avenue is closed to me (and you). I recently read in a magazine and heard on BBC radio about the problem of Spotify and other digital phenomena destroying the music business and any healthy music scene and viable life for music artists such as yourself, so I am all clued up about that. I have never "streamed" anything and would not know how to or have any interest in doing so. I buy a record in a shop, a physical object that I pay money for, and carry home and put on a record player (or CD) and listen to in a deliberate focussed way. In the 1980s I listened to Astral Weeks perhaps 400 times across that decade (rough estimate) and I have listened to Like A Rolling Stone also hundreds of times. I access and listen to music exactly as I did 60 years ago. This was not streaming. It was listening, communing, being. And when Looking Glass came out I listened to it 60 times across several months. That was two and a half years ago and I still listen to it today when I am led to turn to it. In the wake of Oct 7 the Olivia Chaney album Shelter began to enter my listening and clocked up scores of plays for many months, a refuge of sanity and precious life, and I am still listening to that one too.
I hope my message herewith is one that will be welcomed by you and anyone who is part of this endless thread. More in due course, if due course does indeed ensue.
Thanks for sharing Alela. Your words make me go back to my youth. And I realize how life with your family, back then considered ordinary and mundane, now becomes precious memories. The way you describe those memories in your songs makes them real gems.
Thanks, Hans :)
I still have similar dreams about my grandparents’ house, they sold it when I was ten and I struggled to accept it (it was an incredible house, we were very lucky). I still visit it in my dreams, and until a few years ago this scenario when the new owners discover me was recurrent. I had never read about this kind of dreams, I loved reading you ! And the story about the actual visit of the actual house is beautiful
Thanks for writing this. I've had on and off dreams of trespassing my family home since I sold it. In the dreams I am always there to spend the night and then I suddenly realize (with horror) that it was not mine anymore and that I have actually trespassed and that the new owners might come any minute(and of course, they almost always do). I had such a visceral reaction reading about your actual visit and the timing of the new owner appearing.
Some places certainly stay with us…. It’s wild.
Alela. I was in tears reading this. I am so glad you managed to go back and visit briefly. Especially with your daughter. I took my grandchildren back to my childhood home. We lived out bush, so I just rocked up to the house and introduced myself. Lovely people, who invited us to stay for dinner and we shared stories about 'our' home. On another note. Hope you get back to Australia one day. Cheers.
I found this incredibly moving Alela. We each have our stories of childhood and coming-of-age in place. I am still haunted in my dreams by the perceived utopia of the rental house in the Blue Mountains that was the last in a long line of rentals my mother moved us to. It’s where I spent my whole teens and for some reason, it’s the house that will always be the place of safety and peace in my mind. Every now and then I scan the real estate websites to look at the houses I’ve lived in, and do a “virtual” trespass. I’m so glad for you that you had the guts to actually go in there with your daughter. What a special moment.
This was so beautifully written, thank you so much for sharing.
Despite the heartbreak of its end it sounds and looks like a beautiful upbringing.
My parents divorced at a similar age, the year before my last of high school and my mom started a new life with a new man and I wasnt a part of it at all.
If you feel like it, you should write about your year in San Fransisco, I for one would have loved to hear about it.
Thanks Alela for all your beautiful words and songs.
Thank you — these sorts of life transitions are never easy, but they lead us to where we are… I’ll think on San Francisco :)
Beautiful thread, thanks for sharing the link between these three songs. I go back to my childhood home in recurring dreams too.
Really... There's really a story behind every song. I'll listen to them differently now, understanding the meaning and the feeling behind every word. Thanks so much for this! Reading and listening at the same time was magic.
That was a beautiful house. We had some great potluck and played a lot of music on that porch. And many band practices in that garage.❤️
This is a fascinating and moving account. For me, Looking Glass is your best album since To Be Still, and Dream A River is the best track. The arrangement with the softly padding or panting strings gently offsetting the unhurried beat plus the higher vocal register in the chorus, with its piercingly cheerful "hook" line, make it the one I commune with most, for its eerie compassion - as in the Hopkins sonnet "My own heart let me more have pity on".
In recent years I have had some extraordinary dreams full of powerful meaning which this brief entry provides no space to describe and explore. The house I was born in and grew up in for two decades is still there in outer London. These days it is possible to look at property sites online and with luck arrive at a photo of it, and info on its most recent sale price. About 30 years ago I went to look at it - walked down the short cul-de-sac with the little circular island at the bottom, and briefly stood there. As in the Tennyson line in Tears Idle Tears - "so sad, so strange, the days that are no more" - it was calmly discomfiting. I don't see myself ever doing it again. Sometimes in dreams I am in scenarios which I detect on waking to be from there, often overlapping and merging and blurring with my (much) later life experiences but still real, as if the early distant formative events are operating as an understudy or prompter in the theatre of life which I now move and breathe and act in.
I think as a singer songwriter you are good at this side of life experience. I once listened to Forest Parade online and I talk about it somewhere in my book Scrapbook Scriptures: Alela Diane In My Listening Life, which I began writing in 2018. This was not premeditated and has no plan - I did not intend to start doing it at all but it emerged as a project one day which builds up in discrete "modules" of varying lengths, not a logical prescribed development of successive chapters serving a fixed, teleological objective. This year I am quietly carefully reading through the whole thing so far to study what I am saying in it, all 10 modules. Module 8 called Allelulia Alela is perhaps the strongest, with its departure point being a comment I heard once on the radio in a discussion of music - someone said dismissively of music that preceded Bach-Mozart-Beethoven et al becoming more popular, "oh, they just like the sound of it", a foolishly elitist attitude I feel called to witness against. I talk about Cold Moon and describe your voice in my "listening life" alongside Gaelic singer Christine Primrose and the Carter Family singer Sarah Carter and Kathleen Ferrier singing "English Songs".
The other comments to your post below are all very relevant and encouraging. I would be able to do more of the above as a full paid member of ET, but as already stated several times, the technology has obstructed me by declining my card for payment with no justification, so until you tell me this has been fixed, that avenue is closed to me (and you). I recently read in a magazine and heard on BBC radio about the problem of Spotify and other digital phenomena destroying the music business and any healthy music scene and viable life for music artists such as yourself, so I am all clued up about that. I have never "streamed" anything and would not know how to or have any interest in doing so. I buy a record in a shop, a physical object that I pay money for, and carry home and put on a record player (or CD) and listen to in a deliberate focussed way. In the 1980s I listened to Astral Weeks perhaps 400 times across that decade (rough estimate) and I have listened to Like A Rolling Stone also hundreds of times. I access and listen to music exactly as I did 60 years ago. This was not streaming. It was listening, communing, being. And when Looking Glass came out I listened to it 60 times across several months. That was two and a half years ago and I still listen to it today when I am led to turn to it. In the wake of Oct 7 the Olivia Chaney album Shelter began to enter my listening and clocked up scores of plays for many months, a refuge of sanity and precious life, and I am still listening to that one too.
I hope my message herewith is one that will be welcomed by you and anyone who is part of this endless thread. More in due course, if due course does indeed ensue.
orrabest
Jerry in the Port Of Leith in Scotland