I just got back from Thanksgiving in Maine with a wonderful woman named L, who gave me a giant bed to sleep on beneath a Goddess-angel mural. Needless to say, a great deal of sleeping ensued. As did a great deal of talking about colors, songs, vaginas, God, tea, men, and pink salad. Now, I believe I am ready to give you the more fleshed-out announcement about my upcoming album: what it's all about, and how you can help make it happen. This is a paste from the letter I just wrote my email list:

This album came to me like a black-skied afternoon storm at the beach on a sticky summer day. These songs tumbled out like a story that I was living inside of as I wrote it. Chronologically, they span from this March until this past Saturday. Each song is a particular moment in a healing path that I can only describe as it unfolds. They describe a sharp, sweet, difficult process of discovering who I am, how to be true to myself, how I have hurt myself and others by not being true to myself, and how to move forward inch by inch, song by song, with my whole hurt body and my whole broken heart. These songs are honest, above all because I didn't know what the next day held as I wrote them. I just had to be present to what I could know in the moment.

I call these songs the Color Suite. My goal is to use very concrete, particular images--as in the simple color-object combinations of the song titles--to evoke a universal narrative of self-discovery and healing. In my experience there is nothing that resonates more universally in our narratives than their very peculiarity. The colors, objects, elements, totems and symbols I weave together in these songs came to me primarily in dreams, and in some cases from accessing my subconscious in waking life. Describing my healing in poetic terms has been a large part of the healing itself; making narrative continuity out of its irrational trajectory has allowed me to affirm the value and the functioning wholeness of my story, while not trying to contain it within limiting interpretations. It is my hope that this sense of narrative continuity will in turn inspire listeners to think about the construction of their own narratives. I hope to affirm their own ability to integrate the stray threads of their experiences, emotions, ethos and dream lives in to something that is beautiful to them, that is worth living, that is worth risking your vulnerability to whatever the next surprising summer storm will bring.

In practical terms, I am going to record these songs over Christmas break, back in Michigan, on the farm where I was born. The backing band will mostly include other women in the Earthwork Music collective. These songs are a lot about my quest to discover my own womanhood, and I think they can help lend voice to that particular struggle. I hope to work on mixing, mastering, packaging design and other details over the following 4-6 months, and release it in the late spring.

Ideally, I want to release the album in combination with a small chap book. The CD would be sold in a sleeve inside the book for $15 total. Each song corresponds to a poem, story, letter fragment or journal scrap in the chap book that helps to illuminate the song's symbolic significance, to show another angle of the experience in my life that it speaks to, or to integrate it in the larger vision of the album. The design of the book doesn't have to be anything fancy--depending on funds, it might, indeed, turn out to be a publication of "Kinkos Press"--but it will, of course, require some additional money to produce.

This brings me to the other reason I am writing, besides just to share the joy: I need your help. By recording at my dad's house, I am cutting out a great chunk of money I would normally need for studio time. However, mixing and mastering will cost, and so will packaging (book!) design and duplication. Since my small amount of savings is all reserved for college right now, I need to know how much I can count on in sales after I release the album. So for those who know they want to own it, I need preorders like crazy! The CD will be $15, and if you want to buy more than one, that's beautiful, and if you want to contribute more to the cause without buying extras, that would also be greatly appreciated, and I will surely pass along the generosity by giving some CDs away to people who may not have a lot but still want to participate in the healing musical dialogue.

If you would like to pre-order The Color Suite, please email me and I will tell you where to send a check (for $15 per copy).

If you would like to preview two of the songs, rough rough demos of both "Red Line" and "Black Plum" are up on my Myspace page right now.

Thank you so much for the encouragement I have already recieved from some of you. Thank you to all of you for recognizing with me (and Van Morrison) that the Healing Has Begun.

Much Love,
Sari