I wrote this song to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Norwegians emigrating to the upper Midwest in 1825. I tried to imagine what it must be like for a person to risk everything to come to a new place. What to bring? Memories of family and friends, the food one grows up with, religious beliefs, music, hope. For this song, the immigrant brings along flower seeds from the garden she grew up with. In doing so, I was remembering the beautiful flower garden my grandmother had in Minot. She was born in US in the late 1800s. Her family came from Norway. So the seeds represent all that we carry with us and pass on to future generations. 

The song was arranged by Emerson Eads. PHD, who was then director of choral activities at Minot State University (North Dakota). It was sung by the MSU concert choir. Emerson is now director of choral activites at SIU, Carbondale. I created the video to go with the song. 

It occurs to me, when I watch the news, that the tidal wave that killed more than 200,000 people around Indonesia in 2004--well that could have been one of us who got swept away. And some survived--the baby floating on a mattress, the girl who grabbed a tree. Why them? Why not us? Or, when it happens to us, whatever that is, why us? My point is that we are all subject to the whims of nature, or luck, or God. So this song is one of compassion to try to get us to see another's point of view. Compassion for each other--for the immigrant, for the hungry. Indeed, it could have been one of us, or our parents or grandparents, trying to survive. 

I wrote this song in 2024 after Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the East Coast, especially North Carolina. People were swept to sea. They drowned in the river. They were hit by falling trees. Emerson Eads, PhD, the Director of Choral Activities at Minot State University (North Dakota) selected this song and added his magic touch and his concert choir to the song. Thank you, Emerson! (Emerson is now at SIU at Carbondale, IL. 

The song is posted in “music videos” 

Utterly heartbroken following the massacre of 19 students and two teacher in Uvalde, TX on May 2022, I wrote this song. We videotaped it live in a school room in Seattle as my submission to the Tiny Desk Contest. We need to ask the question: what can we do to change a culture that refuses to address the dire impact of high-capacity guns? Do the children have a say? In writing the song, I was thinkiing about the grieving mothers, fathers, neighbors, relatives and people like me, far away from Uvalde who nonetheless feel the excruciating pain and loss. I was accompanied on this music video by Bradley Hawkins (cello), Jess Alldredge (violin), Mark Ippolito (guitar), arranged by Seven Spillios. 

The video is posted on the “Music Videos” 

Two years ago I was watching the news in our hotel in Florida. Top of the cycle were stories about immigration. Immigrants were struggling to get across the border but the access was getting harder by the minute. The president, calling them "rapists and criminals" declared that he would build a wall  from one end of the US-Mexican border to the other. Even people with sick children who needed medical treatment in the United States were being denied entry.

I tried to process my tears and heartache about what was happening by writing a song about it. This song, Heart-Shaped Key, started out quite differently than it ended up, but that's part of the process. When I finished it, I sang it at some open mics and people began requesting it. I decided to share it with others by making a music video of one woman's story of trying to immigrate from El Salvador with her baby, something that reflected what I had heard in the news.

The illustrations in the video are simple, as if this complicated story is being told by a child. I engaged my neighbor, Eleanor, age seven, to color the images in her own imaginative way. The result is a three-minute piece that I hope will compel people to donate to immigration services. Or at least to think about what is happening with a little more compassion. Click this link to see and hear.

“So . . . what comes first,” asks my friend Jim. “the lyrics or the melody?” 

“Both,” I say. 

They come at the same time, like orphaned twin angels. They come while I am walking, freed of the distractions of my computer, email, groceries, bookkeeping, cat litter, everything. A phrase arrives and I sing it. This is a free-floating place: I am walking among stars or clouds, listening to the universe. 

I pull out my iPhone into which I sing my song snippets, accompanied by the swoosh of buses, percussion of rush hour, chatter of passers-by. The songs enter the world without any criticism from me. Much later, after the words are written down and the melody sketched out, I begin to examine them deeply, tweaking version after version. 

Years ago I had a drawing teacher who told us that we should walk out on our work and then come back later (a minute? An hour? A day?) to surprise it. So we can really SEE the work. I try to do that with my songs. I record them, listen to them before sleep and then surprise them in the morning. I evaluate, adjust a word, a space, a breath, a chord.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. It can take a long time. Maybe a month, six months, a year. Or even years, until that initial impulse snatched from the universe, recorded into my phone, becomes the final piece that ends up getting recorded. And that’s another story.

Several years ago while sitting in a Costco parking lot, I started writing a song for my husband called "Traveler." I was trying to find a way to say "I love you" without saying exactly that . . . but more. How could I express the the depth of love I felt for this person I have been with for so many years? Images started to develop, as if coming into view in a darkroom tray. "If you were a traveler, I'd be the road, I'd wind out before you to help carry your load." The images went on from there, a sort of laundry list of who he is ("If you were a poet, I'd be the rhyme") and the existential question about what happens to us when we are gone ("if you were the heavens, I'll be the earth"). I ended up giving the song to him as a Christmas present and then several years later, sang it for friends at their wedding.