When things get bad enough, your only resort is to lie in bed and start praying.
I am consciously trying not to make it sound Celtic or African.
My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has. . . coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.
The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.
Families of privilege and money would have harps in their parlors, and their cultured daughters would learn to play. It's got such a strange history. But that wasn't the context that I learned it in, so the inherent friction between that history and the more humanist folk-y history wasn't in my conscience at all.
I never thought people would be mortally offended by the sounds I was making.
I don't look at people's expressions, because I still get nervous when I play, especially when I first put the harp up there. I just try to tune - it takes me a half-hour to tune, and I get nervous if I look at anybody when I do it.
Tomorrow is promised to no one.
Even the klan revamped their image by losing the hoods and changing their name to the Tea Party.
I just feel as though it's become a situation where people have manifested this caricature of who I am, and they act as if there's no real person inside of it.
The mind is the source of all experience, and by changing the direction of the mind, we can change the quality of everything we experience.