#songsaboutexistence — Public Fediverse posts

Kate Wolf Sings “Across the Great Divide”

Listen to this track by Northern Californian singer-songwriter and country folk paragon Kate Wolf. It’s “Across the Great Divide”, the opening track to the 1981 album Close to You, her fourth. That record built on momentum that Wolf created for herself as an independent musician, initially releasing her material with her band The Wildwood Flower on her self-started Owl label. Her style touches on Sixties folk revivalist ingredients inspired by The Weavers, The Kingston Trio, and The Carter Family as well as from the country music radio she heard growing up in the Fifties.

Wolf achieved local popularity in Sonoma County and then the Bay Area, and soon became a stalwart participant in folk festivals all over North America in the 1970s. She didn’t exactly catch on as a name on the cover of Rolling Stone. Maybe this was because she chose to put her music out on her own label and fashion a career outside of the music industry establishment. She would branch out later in the decade when she signed with indie label Kaleidoscope who released her 1979 record Safe at Anchor. But Wolf would remain an independent artist who put out records on her own terms.

Taking her own path allowed her to craft a unique approach to American folk, bluegrass, and country traditions that put the storytelling aspects of her songwriting to the forefront. That emphasis on narrative and lyrical clarity gives Wolf’s music a warm, plainspoken, and straightforward quality that would inspire a generation of upcoming songwriters including Nanci Griffiths, Iris Dement, and Greg Brown. Wolf also inspired her contemporaries. This included Emmylou Harris who covered Wolf’s material later on.

By the time this song and the Close to You album came out, Wolf had folded The Wildwood Flower after two albums. She regularly toured with Bruce “Utah” Phillips, who would become a venerable and venerated folk music figure in his own right for decades. Phillips took her with him on tours of the Midwest, east coast, and into Canada’s folk music festivals in Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. By the end of the Seventies, she established a musical bond with guitarist and mandolinist Nina Gerber who’s guitar lines are prominent here on “Across the Great Divide” as entwined with Wolf’s own.

On this cut, Gerber and the rest of the band, including Norton Buffalo who provides a second lead voice with his harmonica, help Wolf retain the back porch quality that gives her music its warmth and humanity. The instrumentation and arrangements convey an inviting in-the-room feel that lends this song a certain timelessness, defiant of trends, and leaning into the fundamentals of telling relatable musical stories to an audience without flashiness or artifice.

“Across the Great Divide” remains one of Kate Wolf’s strongest artistic statements. It’s concerned with the strangeness of passing time, when events and chapters of one’s life seem both far away and almost like yesterday all at the same time. By the time she wrote this song, she was entering middle age. Beyond the literal geographical reference to the actual continental divide (where rivers really do change direction), whether this life milestone is the metaphorical great divide in the title or not is arguable.

However, this is a phase of life when perspectives change and people find themselves looking back more often than before. When we do that, it can be overwhelming as well as awe-inspiring as we consider those things which are unique to us; our memories, lessons, travels, mistakes, loves, sorrows, joys, connections, challenges, and achievements. Sometimes, our life stories can seem like they happened to a completely different person as we reflect on them. At a certain point in our lives, it becomes easy to say to ourselves where all the years went, I can’t say.

That contemplative space is exactly where this song lives. In this, “Across the Great Divide” has less to do with Kate Wolf as she sings it, and more to do with us as her audience as we hear her sing. And maybe this is a more useful conception of a great divide, metaphorically speaking; an earned awareness that has grown out of experience and how our own sense of mortality shapes our perspectives as we look back on where we’ve been, who we’ve been, and who we’ve become in the bewildering passage of time.

Wolf’s song suggests that an embrace of the mysterious nature of our lives as beings in time is the best way to avoid being in fear of it.

The finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It’s when the darkness rolls away

~ “Across the Great Divide” by Kate Wolf

There is a certain defiant hopefulness in this line. Where a song about the passage of time and of mortality could have easily turned down a path defined by ennui, this tune leans toward the light instead. Perhaps this is yet another great divide to consider as we find ourselves on the mountainsides of our lives; that they have been worth living, and that even in their imperfect episodes, they belong to us. As we consider the passing years, we can decide to be content instead of fearful as we straddle the great divide between the edge of night and the break of day.

Kate Wolf put out two more records of original material after Close to You, taking a brief sabbatical at one point, and then resuming her activities on the folk festival circuit and on broadcasts including A Prairie Home Companion and Austin City Limits. In April of 1986, Kate was diagnosed with acute leukemia. After a period of recovery and remission, the disease returned and she underwent a bone marrow transplant. Her immune system never bounced back. She died in December of 1986 at the too-young age of 44, remembered fondly by her fans, musical peers, and celebrated by her friends and family.

Speaking of her family, they established and currently curate the Kate Wolf official website. So, to learn more about her including biographical information and notes on all six of her original albums along with posthumous live and compilation releases, be sure and check that out.

To get a sense of Kate Wolf as a live act, check out this clip of her playing “Like a River” on Austin City Limits. Among other things, you’ll get a sample of Nina Gerber’s considerable skills on the mandolin along with that of fellow player Randy Sabien.

Enjoy!

Joanna Sternberg Sings “I’ve Got Me”

Listen to this track by New York City-based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist Joanna Sternberg. It’s “I’ve Got Me”, the title track of their second record that came out in June of 2023. It followed their debut Then I Try Some More from 2019, a record that established their artistic voice as one who leads with stark self-examination, candour, and with a homemade approach to presenting music that is highly personal and universal at the same time. Scoring high marks with critics upon its release, music publications noted that this follow-up revealed greater ambition beyond that debut while still retaining its aural coziness.

Sternberg wrote the songs that appeared on the record during a period of personal transition out of bad relationships and substance use. Putting the new record together had been challenging on other fronts, corresponding with the initial phase of the pandemic. Sternberg included songs they’d tinkered with for many years even before their debut while also writing new ones.

Old and new, the songs are couched in a sound that suggests 1930s dustbowl folk textures meeting with the melodic qualities of the American Songbook. Sternberg’s voice sounds like it belongs to someone you know, singing the tunes as they sit beside you, if not directly for your benefit. In fact, it seems like this song, and others on the record, are necessary for the songwriter to sing, rather than presented primarily as a way to entertain an audience.

Art in general plays an important role for many people to make sense of their lives and existence in a world that often feels so isolating. Even for people without ADHD, autism, and being non-binary as Sternberg is, feelings of self-doubt, self-consciousness in social settings, and struggles with identity and purpose plague many of us.

Navigating the intricacies of relationships and how that corresponds to how we view ourselves in them and outside of them challenges everyone. Sternberg reflects these themes strongly in this tune, which presents many of these struggles upfront. But it also contains a turnaround that captures something that’s equally powerful in everyone’s life.

The song starts off in a bleak but plain-spoken place nested in an undeniable truth; that good or bad, we’re stuck with ourselves. However we present ourselves to the world, or how other people project traits, characteristics, roles, and identities onto us, we can’t escape our own internal voices, fears, doubts, and feelings. When we wake up, there we are. When we go to bed, there we are still.

In between as we engage in the routines and rhythms of our lives, the internal chaos of our histories, perceptions, and anxieties come right along with us. Sometimes those inner demons speak out of turn at exactly the wrong moments. We have our baggage to carry with us, no matter how heavy it is. And the only way forward is through.

“And all my faults and flaws and lies
Are no one’s fault but mine
Between self-hatred and self-awareness
Is a very small thin line
I can’t stop my worry, and my fury
Of all that I’ve done wrong
I waste so much time I mean it
So much time …”

~ “I’ve Got Me” by Joanna Sternberg

Left by itself, this section of the tune might be construed as an exercise in wallowing in self pity, employing stark language that hits like a hammer, in particular the lines between self-hatred and self awareness is a very small thin line and I waste so much time, I mean it, so much time.

But “I’ve Got Me” isn’t a self-pitying statement of suffering, dissatisfaction, or hopelessness. It’s a journey away from it. Sternberg accomplishes this by being upfront with their language, as always. But they also manage to convey a temperature change in their delivery as the song progresses, doing so with great subtlety.

As much as “I’ve Got Me” is about being subject to forces that have shaped us beyond our control, it’s also a song about taking back that control. It’s a statement about ownership and of doing the things that are necessary to set ourselves on the right roads as we see them after making mistakes. This involves taking actions even if those actions seem small.

Why is it so hard to be kind and gentle to myself?
Take the box of self-deprecation
Lock it and put it on the shelf
Then wait five days, take that box
Throw it in the fire
Maybe one day
Oh, yeah
One fine day

“I’ve Got Me” catches the song’s narrator at a point of realization. They haven’t quite put their self-doubt and insecurity to rest. But the vision for how to do that is here. “I’ve Got Me” is a declaration. It’s a manifestation that if laying down one’s burdens can be pictured, then it’s also achievable. By putting it in a song, the song itself becomes a vehicle for emancipation for its author, just by singing it. For us, it models our own struggles and therefore reminds us that we aren’t as alone and powerless as we think.

In this, “I’ve Got Me” isn’t a diary entry or even primarily a means of art therapy for its author. It’s also an expression of empathy and care for anyone who feels a bit lost and unsure of their own worth sometimes. It acknowledges that the act of pushing through struggles, baggage, and pain is a human reality beyond just a single set of circumstances. The implicit takeaway in “I’ve Got Me” is a call for self-love in the midst of that, no matter who we are or what we’re carrying around with us.

By the end of two minutes and change of a running time, Sternberg’s tune can be as much about us as it is about them. We’ve all got ourselves, warts and all. But we’ve also got ourselves; whole universes of warm emotions, treasured memories, unique perspectives, and possibilities that the world has never seen the like of ever before.

Joanna Sternberg is an active musician, songwriter, and visual artist today. You can learn more about them at joannasternberg.com

For more on Joanna Sternberg and the role that songwriting and making art plays in their life, check out this 2023 interview on Pitchfork.

Enjoy!

#2020sMusic #folkPop #joannaSternberg #singerSongwriters #songsAboutExistence