The Fado Suite
A cry for hope. Tenderness? Sure, but so little. Just because a swallow dies, spring does not end. The soul gets tired. The fingers take orders from the heart. We leave our bodies when we sing. The alchemy of sound and poem, it’s inside us from birth. ** I cannot remember if there was a candle on the clothed table set for one. I do remember the vinho verde chilling in a teakwood bucket, poured solemnly between sets of fado, smoldering and mournful tearful singer, wet cheeks lit by dying candlelight. I remember. ** Listening to Amalia with the windows wide open, saudade piercing the autumn evening gloom. My new Portuguese guitar yearns for me to learn, to teach old fingers new licks, so I dream I am wandering the calcadas in Lisbon inventing my own heteronyms, humming melodies born under different names. I greet Fernando Pessoa, “Bom dia, Senhor. I saw you sitting outside the Brasileira today but you were not actually there nor anywhere else.” “That is how I prefer it,” they replied without inflection then vanished scientifically in the color-swarm of Chiado hordes… I awake to Amalia singing life’s last song, to the gray-soaked murk and swirling fog. The music pours through my opened heart. My weeping eyes listen to the distant, wild ocean wind. (c) Eric Walter 2022
This song is played on a double flute (drone flute) made by Odell Borg.
The waterfalls seen in the video are located in Skamania County, Washington, USA. Dedicated to my beautiful Nikki.
So named by painter Georgia O'Keeffe, the "white place" (La Plaza Blanca) is a geologically unique and stunningly picturesque area near the Rio Chama in northern New Mexico (USA). It was a favored painting location for O'Keeffe and is visible from her house in Abiquiu Pueblo. Nikki and I spent a beautiful morning there during our visit to New Mexico in November of 2019. Nikki had a vigor that had been absent since her diagnosis, and it seemed as if the chemotherapy through which she had been suffering was perhaps working. Little did either of us imagine that she had only ten weeks to live. This was the last hike we took together.
This song was the first track recorded during the "She Who Watches" sessions in December of 2020. It features guitar, Native American flute, mandolin, and accordion.
La Plaza Blanca
You could see it from her house in Abiquiú across the Rio Chama Georgia’s skull-white landscape muse owned now by a mosque Dar al Islam that grants us heathens and pilgrims of Other respectful access to this pallid sanctum of tuneful wind raven song ringing beyond chalky hoodoos and along milky ledges pastel creek beds that seem to run more ways than one. Then silence then song again then wind then none. With Georgia’s ghost and the hosts of Muhammed we track a shadowy past slipping through fences of barbwire and bone pondering strange exhibits of black stones on this ashen canvas stretching beyond time. This sun-bleached forever is quite hard to find there are no signs and the address in the local guide is 1234 Fictitious Lane. |