I Contain Multitudes
On Sliding Doors & Wanting More
‘Lord I’m just one girl, wish I was three’ (Leaving Kentucky by Mickey Newbury)
In my favourite dream life, I am a tambourine player. Like a professional tambourine player. I turn up at my gig*, shake it all loose, keep the beat, fuck with time, get real paid and go home, then do it all again tomorrow night. People nod approvingly as I move through the night and strut through the streets, internally buoyed by my ability to hold and mould time in my strong hands like elastic; ‘there’s that tambourine player, man she can really shake it’.
The real world counterpart for this dream life character would basically be Ms Bobbye Hall, a prodigy percussionist who has played on sessions and stages for Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Carole King, Tom Waits, Tom Petty, Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Bill Withers, everybody. She met and vibed with Janis Joplin at Sunset Sound the day she died, and had to return and play the tambourine parts after she was gone. She describes asking them to turn the lights out in the studio and just let her play alone. She calls it her only ‘wake recording’. A Motown producer saw her playing tambourine at a sock-hop when she was 11 and invited her to ‘make a session’. She said ‘Sure, what’s a session?’ and before she knew it she was in demand studio gold. Her first time onstage was playing with Marvin Gaye and it blew her mind. She told NPR ‘I ran to the telephone and called my mom and said, 'Mom, you're not going to believe this. They're dancing to the music that we're making onstage. They're wearing heels and mink coats — Mom, it's so great.' By 1978 she was on a world tour with Bob Dylan earning $2500 per week (equivalent of around $10k today). She has described Stevie Nicks as ‘That woman knows how to party!’. Sometimes I’d really like to be Bobbye, or maybe her doppelganger in a parallel universe.
Doppelgangers and parallel universes have always fascinated me. I was walking down a little alley the other night and saw a window that looked startlingly like I never realised my own windows have always looked til then: red gingham curtain, some little decorative item propped up against the dirty glass, warm lamplit glow. My husband said, imagine if you knocked on the door and another you answered? It didn’t seem impossible. Dylan told Playboy in 1978: ‘Someplace on the planet, there’s a double of me walking around’.
I get to explore many alternate realities through my songs. I wrote and recorded Now You Know Nashville in Nashville, a song about being a young woman with a more than passing resemblance to 1968 era Dolly Parton arriving in Music City ‘fresh off the bus’ and ready to set the town on fire, only to discover that before she can really write a good hurtin’ song from the heart, she has to learn about love the hard way from a local cowboy hustler who sees girls like her arrive every week and plays them like a deck of cards. My accompanying press release stated: There is no song in my catalogue that encapsulates my true self and my secret dreams more than this one, so here I am, proudly sporting gingham and lace, stepping off a Greyhound, living out my honky-tonk dreams in a parallel universe. Although the girl in the song gets her heart two-stepped on, in the end she wins, cos she is now an unbeatable songwriter. I hope she making a motza.
I’m not the only one to use songs as a portal to another world. Steve Miller was a joker, a smoker and a midnight toker - not to mention a space cowboy, the gangster of love and some guy called Maurice. He says he was referring to all the people he had been in his songs. Allison Russell is a stone bonafide nightflyer, an angel of the morning, a midnight rider, the melody and the space between, every note the swallow sings, fourteen vultures circling, a crawling, dying thing, the smoke up above the trees, the fire and the branch that's burning - girl’s got it all and she speaks the truth. Sometimes I have to crawl inside this song and listen to it ten times in a row its so good.
Here’s a playlist I made called ‘Multitudes’ that explores all the people we can be, paths not taken or taken, potential and possibilities. Singers compare themselves to mirrors and records, maids, kings, skies and angels and dream of what might be if they were carpenters or vampires or someone’s girlfriend or living in another time:
It’s a collection of wonder and dreams and what ifs and if onlys and a magnifying glass into all the breathtaking prospects and panoramas of the many imaginary lives we could and can and don’t inhabit.
‘They say you only live once, but oh I’ve lived so many lives….’
(If Willie’s Right by Lo Carmen - song soon to be recorded on our next album)
Soak it up and wring it out and hang it out to dry.
See you on the other side x
PS: Leave me your hot tips for more multitudinous tunes and tell me your dreams for your parallel lives…
PPS: If you reside in NSW, Australia, please come to the Great Club in Marrickville on Thursday 7th July and let me and my magic band take you somewhere else… I will bring my tambourine and shake it. Tickets and info here.
*since it’s my dream, the gig is with the house band at the Apollo in the early 60s.