Tarot of Songwriting - The Empress
My mother was, for many years, the head gardener for a large house a few miles from where I grew up. Our garden was always beautiful, with wild, colourful borders and wisteria climbing up one side of the kitchen. Summer evenings were spent following her slowly along the edges, smoothing out kinks in the hose - the scent of water mist on hot soil. At the end of the garden was a compost heap beside which stood a shed. Around the age of 7 or 8, I figured out how to scale the wall next to it and sit on top. From there, I could see past a large oak tree into the neighbouring field where, every summer, a local travelling community would pasture their horses. In memory, they were always two white ponies, too small to ride but big enough to tow carriages. They would run and leap together endlessly around the perimeter. I would sit and watch them after dinner until I was called back in for whatever reason. There was also a willow tree to which some giant had attached a plastic pipe swing I could only ever reach by jumping and a small pond where I once saw a snake eating a frog. My sisters, 6 and 8 years my senior, had their own grown-up lives, so I spent a fair amount of my childhood in the garden, quite happily, alone.
To temper this bucolic opening, I should also mention that I watched more television than possibly any other human child alive in the 90’s. Friends, Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses over and over and over again. These are the diametric poles that made me. I am as much English country garden as filmed in front of a live studio audience. The ‘for whatever reason’ I mentioned above was likely a call for me to come inside and watch TV so my parents didn’t have to keep checking whether I’d fallen in the pond.
And now, all grown up, I follow this same ritual, calling myself in in my contemplative moments, proverbially foreclosing on any possibility that I might fall in the pond. For every worthy book I have ever read, I have watched at least five episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I have a master's degree, but I’ve also watched Frasier and The Sopranos start to finish four times (and counting). One pursuit is not better than the other. I think of this ritual as breathing; deep inhales are followed by a long, relieving exhale. It could be viewed as a fear of living, that the possibilities that arise when one is lost in thought or enraptured by a concept are then numbed by unchallenging endeavours. So it may be, but it is how I have lived. And it prevents me from being insufferably intense. This balance loosely reflects my understanding of The Empress.
After writing and recording an album, I allow myself a large and ever-increasingly long exhale. But leading up to the process, I tend to get consumed by a theme that carries me through to the writing - I know when it’s happening now because it feels like picking up breadcrumbs; one book leads to another, or I feel called to travel or learn something new. It happened in pregnancy too (a great creative endeavor blah blah blah), where I suddenly became consumed by learning everything I could about tarot and drew my own version of the major arcana (which accompany these posts). That task was completed as I entered my third trimester, and consequently, I treated myself to a Nintendo Switch so I could play Zelda in the evenings without encountering a single challenging thought.
One of my closest friends once asked me when it was that I actually read books because, she said, I’ve never actually seen you reading. But she had been impressed by my ability to recall Seinfeld one-liners verbatim. I liked that; I feel it’s the right way around. My heady work is done in private. It’s my day job, in a way.
Nature transcends the worthy and the facile, which is why, whatever state or stage I’m in, I’m always searching for the feeling of being in my mother's garden, silently watching horses in the knowledge that while I’m using precisely 0.1 percent of my brain later in the evening, some other portion will be gestating over the day to bare fruit somewhere unexpected down the line. This process is the breathing apparatus of creative work, in my experience, and more accurately represents the working of The Empress card.
So, that being tied up nicely, here is a list of extraordinary places I have had the good fortune to find myself in, which have provoked me to write—swiftly tempered by my favourite TV shows of all time and how many times I’ve watched them.
Places -
Bearsville, NY, in the late summer (Howl At The Moon and most of Short Movie)
The Highlands of Scotland in the early autumn - could have been the summer, hard to tell in Scotland. (A Creature I Don’t Know)
Rural Tuscany, summer evenings (I Speak Because I Can)
The Highlands again, The Isle of Mull in deep winter (Some of Once I Was An Eagle)
Joshua Tree National Park (Short Movie and Semper Femina)
The church on a hill near where I grew up (Goodbye England)
TV -
The Sopranos (might be the greatest thing ever written) x4
Frasier x4
Curb Your Enthusiasm x3
Six Feet Under x2
Friends x infinity
The Magpie
I bought When Women Were Birds from a bookshop in Woodstock, NY, at the end of my first solo touring trip around the States in October 2012, only because the title was so similar to my record, Once I Was An Eagle. I couldn’t believe how perfectly it accompanied my life at that time. Have you ever had that? It’s a thing, I believe.
Terry Tempest Williams is an American conservationist and writer who grew up in the Mormon faith. The tone of voice she uses in this book is strikingly similar to Sharon Olds's in her astounding collection of poems, Stags Leap, which was published in the same year. It’s an older, measured, distinctly American feminine tone I find very soothing, and seem to encounter quite often.
The book is a series of lyrical vignettes based around the event of her mothers death and the collection of notebooks her mother had left her in her will - which contained nothing. What makes it so compelling is the spasmodic fervor of grief - you feel when reading it that she was absolutely compelled to write the thing. I had just experienced this compulsion while writing OIWAE. This passage in particular resonated with me:
Housekeeping -
Thank you all so much for reading this far - I feel extremely lucky to have this outlet for all the time I’ve spent (and thought I’d wasted) underlining things in books.
I’m going to be moving Guitar Tutorial related stuff to separate posts midweek for paid subscribers, rather than having it at the end of these Tarot posts. If you have anything you’d like me to cover - do let me know in the comments.
I’ll also be posting solo acoustic versions of songs, some of my own and covers sporadically for paid subscribers too. If you have anything you want to hear, let me knowww
Founding members, for those of you that signed up before 14th July, there should have been something in the post for you (those outside Europe may take a little longer).
For any new Founding Members, yours will go out in the next round - soon!
And for those of you who have ever so gently made me aware of spelling errors, I’m very grateful. I don’t have an editor and my spelling is appalling. Though I did like “Rachel Cuck” in a Freudian way.
LM x
Laura, i once served you avocado toast in nyc and awkwardly free cookies (I didn’t know how to say thank you without disturbing your time) this was the day or maybe only a few days after semper femina came out. I listened to it on the train that morning. For a year at that awful job I jotted down lyrics and dreamt of having more time to actually pursue this thing. I took you sitting in my section as a sign. Soon after, I quit the job - found something flexible, and got on with booking my first gigs. I’m sure you hear women say all the time that your music has accompanied their life. It is true for me too. I enjoy reading your work so much —- as it also allows me to feel less alone in my creative process. I go from a hyper creative storm to what my therapist calls dissociation (watching Adam Curtis often or silly reality shows,) but she said it was necessary. Thank you for all your work… I listen to patterns and it reminds me of a friend, I call her to get out of my little maze.
Katy Rea
Thank you :)
Beautiful evocative writing and I’m enjoying the books references. Just wanted to share that I’ve recently started guitar lessons (completely beginner) at the age of 55 and feel that I have a very strong inspiration in you. So, thanks again!