The precaution of multiple electronic bleeps and chimes did the trick but they were a far cry from a cock crow. When it comes to being haunted a dream that kept me in its sway for a day was too ghastly to detail. Disturbingly I awoke still the helpless observer of vivid violence against a woman of a kind my mind didn't know it could imagine and this was after what felt set to be the last "nuit blanche" of a long spell.
Tuesday's bid to go to bed relaxed at midnight was unsuccessful; a multitude of memories has pursued me, mostly pleasant ones conjured to mind by recent events, so I gave up and got on with mail, and then that dream. Do Martha Wainwright and a few others get an X-certificate for life episodes still only hinted at in their songs, not as explicit as their lyrics are marked?
 Then I spent time with a woman from Zimbabwe and said, "Despite the job, I can scarcely imagine how it is there right now." She told me. And she told me too of her homeland's Chiwoniso Maraire (Dandemutande), since I've cast my net deep into Africa and its contemporary voices without writing much yet.
Chiwoniso grew up steeped in African sonic traditions in the United States, went to Zimbabwe with her parent music teachers at 15, and says and plays things on the Internet that are an incitement to discover an international career new to me. She sings sometimes in Shona so I don't understand it, but when I know more we'll find out who else is in that net. Oh sad Zimbabwe, where the outlook sounds very bleak indeed!
My respite from my own homeland has proved to be a 25-year one so far, but not for very dire reasons as well as positive ones. I'm taking a break from African news now, but wish my Zimbabwean friend much more than you can say with a squeeze of the hand ... or perhaps, only that way.
What I wish her includes fresh air and room to breathe it. Repeatedly, I've been taking some for myself whenever the finger finds it way back to N for Nova. We're going to linger there awhile with Heather Nova and maybe women she brings to mind whose voices alone are so sublime they are "absolute divas" indeed. The reason a 'Redbird' write-up is still to come is that I've been flying all around this album and could make a large playlist of Heather's previous ones to be content with her for hours!
If variety is the spice of life, then Nova is life itself soaring and swooping across the stratosphere with what sounds like such ease another thing hard to imagine is how many tears and how much sweat it must have taken to develop such a talent.
"All pain, joy, rage, love ... wisdom, can be found in music. I am in awe when in the presence of its power."
That isn't Heather, that's Chiwoniso Maraire from the little I know of a woman who thinks "Music... It's an expression of God." I've explored music and sexuality, which is a blood-stirring and heart-warming subject open to many more words without too much thought for theory, and there have been women who take music to heal -- or maybe give us nightmares! -- but music connects our love lives to the sacred.
Maraire know this, so does Nova. "Sacred" is a powerful word, but it's a powerfully individual thing too. When BJ spoke at the weekend of doing a musicology course, somebody said, "I'm not too sure what musicology (Wikipedia) is."
True, it can sound scholarly, forbidding and there's worse: "ethnomusicology".
In the wrong hands, they are appallingly academic subjects. In mine, you're safe! I find these matters far too much fun to pontificate about them any other way with so many women to choose from as living illustrations of every kind.
Without even touching on the lyrics and life of Heather Allison Frith, who was born in Bermuda on July 6, 1967, it suffices to listen to hear "roots".
Roots of all kinds.
What does the Wikipedia say?
"Musicology is reasoned discourse concerning music (Greek: μουσικη = "music" and λογος = "word" or "reason"). In other words:
"the whole body of systematized knowledge about music which results from the application of a scientific method of investigation or research, or of philosophical speculation and rational systematization to the facts, the processes and the development of musical art, and to the relation of man in general ... to that art (Harvard Dictionary of Music).
"By this definition, the field includes every conceivable discussion of musical topics."
Indeed it does. But that's pretty academic, isn't it? More big words. "Reasoned discourse", scientific research, and "the relation of man in general ... to that art". Woman too, perhaps, but let's not be arch.
My career began with ethnomusicology (Wikipedia), which is about how people make it in different cultures. Yawning?
I did, with many of the books. Not at rock festivals. Not in African villages. Not on Indian trains or in the London Underground. As soon as you wonder "How does she do that? Could I ever do that?" or "Where did she get that instrumental sound from?" you're being a musicologist. If you say "I like her style, but I don't like hers," you know you're feeding an ethnomusicologist?
However, "reasoned debate" and snide remarks about your friend's tastes get tricky when it comes to the "sacred". You know how people can be about their religion: leave well alone. For anthropologists, who study different societies, mostly "primitive", and civilisations, "sacred" can be a more neutral word for that sense of "something other" in which many people find meaning in their lives.
These are all questionable words, open to endless discussion and fuss about my definitions, but I've got a useful cop-out. Let's forget words about words, listen to the music or make love and enjoy what it does for us and to us. Then it gets more agreeable.
I can listen to Heather doing her solo aerobatics at the start of 'Island' on 'Oyster', find them ravishing, then come the words:
"There are parts of me he'll never know,
My wild horses and my river beds,
And in my throat voices he'll never hear.
He pulls at me like a cherry tree,
And I can still move, but I don't speak about it.
Pretend I'm crazy, pretend I'm dead.
He's to scared to hit me now, he'll bring flowers instead."
The voice is gentle, the acoustic guitar full of melody, the backing light, the delivery even, and she is angry. The sacred has been stolen, profanities bring her down and she needs "an island, somewhere to sink a stone". That stone is a guy:
"He fucks with the beauty."
Heather and her bands are very good at this, each album different but often drawing on the sexual politics of the sacred and the profane. In any culture, people take what they find most sacred to bed with them, they eat with it, they sleep with it, and it's vulnerable, open to profanation, violation and rape.
 Somehow the beauty can remain intact, untouched, deep in Heather and deep in us (and a concert snap taken by Marco van Hylckama Vlieg, 'The Net is Dead - Life Beyond the Buzz,' (his weblog, last August ... when I missed her in Paris!) There's no X-certificate to a song like 'Island', I know little about the woman's religion and have yet to listen to 'Redbird', but I'm finding out plenty about her faith and the way she expresses it in conjoining or separating words and music, playing them with or against one another.
When so inclined, Heather can pack a punch like a knuckle-duster. If music is "an expression of God", I feel wary of the deity in Heather's company, could find myself in trouble with priests and definitions, things we might say of "good" and "evil" and who or what is responsible for either.
I'm not sure I want to go there. By contrast, she sings directly to my own sense of the sacred and the profane, what we love, cherish and nurture in ourselves and in others, and where we cause hurt and wound. She addresses what we feel to be "right" and "wrong" through expression of the emotions in music that weaves often into words of wisdom.
It may be my own faith she sustains, one that has come to place angels and demons inside me, nowhere else, unable to blame others for what I do. Other people may have quite different ideas about all that from mine. Whenever I've returned to Nova though, at infrequent intervals, while I find her a very fine lyricist, what I've remembered most is the music and the voice.
It's almost less what she says than how she says it that has infiltrated me, haunts my circuitry. How Heather Nova does that as a musician who draws on many cultures and traditions turns on the ethnomusicologist for a rainier day, such is the variety. She doesn't want me writing about her as a woman too much though:
"'I think it's a shame that when it comes to being a female singer-songwriter, that gender seems to have become a genre,' Nova says. 'I thought that things like Lilith Fair would help to dispel that but, in the end, I guess that even seems to have become a trend.'"
I find she's said more of what I'm saying in that 2002 article on a fan site by April Labine, who writes that Heather composes in solitude, then needs to perform.
"'Sometimes I think when you're singing live and you’re involved in that process with an audience, you almost get in touch with something higher,' Nova says. 'I sort of feel that it's not about me anymore. It's just about soul. The music is creating a connection between the audience and me.'
"Nova admits that she often feels like a medium for the music. This is why performing is just as important to her as songwriting. To do one without the other would make her craft incomplete.
"'Songwriting is something that I need to do emotionally and performing is something that I find physically and spiritually important'" (Heather Nova: Anti-Pop Heroine).
She even talked about dreams there, how they can "paralyse you if you are too attached to them" but matter because "they keep you moving forward." I'd rather keep that piece of sense in mind than one morning's hangover welling up from I know not where, since what will shortly be physically and spiritually important to me is sleep.
"It's just about soul."
I'm glad she said it herself. Heather Nova has made several live albums that prove her other point, but so do studio ones. The exchange, for such it is, between her and you seems to get you in touch with something higher than you both.
1:45:58 AM link 
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