ON FOLK (2021)

i like folk music. i write songs that might be described as folk songs, but i think of them more as folk paintings because of my relationship to the crafting of their images. meanwhile i think of my paintings, my plays, and even my expression of characters when i am acting as folk songs. my paintings specifically are songs in that they’re usually narrative in some way but anyone could come up to them and see a different story/the stories of their own imagination, and even if there isn’t one clear story, there’s still a feeling of a story. they’re also songs in that they have rhythms and refrains across time (it’s just a different scale of time), and in that as i make them, i feel an activation/sensation of a deeper voice coming through, only through my body and hands instead of through my throat and mouth. in all of my work there is also something about magic, manifestation, and divination happening, which i see as folk acts too, because they have something grassroots about them, in the sense that i don’t need someone else to give me permission to practice magic, to practice my own healing

i like folk because it DOES something

i like the self-sovereignty of it

i like how it reminds me of the equality of every human being

i like how what is deeply personal becomes a mythology, how the personal can rise up and become the mythical, and the mythical can come back down and expand the personal

i like how anyone can contribute with the thread of their own intuition to the wider weave of folk across time and place

i like how it’s mimetic: call and response in the moment and through generations, like an infinite game of telephone

i like how it is collective but never erasing or flattening into sameness: how countless individuals can develop the same song to sing a baby to sleep over millennia, but a single individual can, moved by that same spirit, make their own sudden lullabye