HOW MANY DAYS IN MARCH?
I did about a million things in the last thirty days.
After publicly proclaiming to the world (or however many of you are on this email) that a newsletter service is too expensive, I discovered I have been paying for this without using it since I set my website up five years ago. I’m doing just fine.
March has come and gone with an absolute bang, and was probably the busiest month I have ever had in my life. I released an album, sang in shows all over the place, and went to India on a two week tour which I’ve just come back from. In fact, I am writing this from the airport, where I am stuck for the next hour and a half because of a flight delay.
I Released an Album
My debut studio album, The Juniper Suite came out on March 6 with the help of the wonderful folks at cmntx records. I worked on “an album” all through college and before, and wrote two different versions of “an album” before this appeared in my head. The other two are scrapped, you’ll probably never find them. It was always supposed to be this—a sprawling, dramatic, sparkly at times, gritty at times, exploration of the parts of myself that I never wanted to show.
I played a show at Sleepwalk to celebrate the release, surrounded by the most wonderful and supportive friends and family. I had the privilege of being joined on stage by my incredible friends Thor Keefer, M. Turner McCabe, and Zeelie Brown. Colleen Brostek, who I’ve been honored to work with a thousand times over the last few years, took the most amazing photos. I’m so grateful to everyone that came out to this and gave it your energy.
From there I went to Chicago and had a very fabulous and chic album release party at the underground lesbian bar, Dorothy. The album was celebrated by more friends, more family, more love. Photos from this are coming soon (digital cameras take a long time to develop, apparently).
I spent about a week in Chicago getting ready to depart for India, and sang in the chorus for The Lord of the Rings. If you’ve never looked at the music for this, it’s a whole lot of Elvish in a very short amount of time. We did two performances and boy is that movie long.
The next day, I went to India. Joined by 53 singers from Uniting Voices, and an incredible team of staff and artists, I set off on the first tour of my adult life. We spent two weeks in India, performing all over every place and immersing the young singers in Indian culture.
Starting in Panchgani, at Initiatives of Change’s Asia Plateau, we worked with an amazing team of workshop facilitators—Leslie, Mayuree, Shruti, Vedanth, Sai, Syd, and Archana—on various forms of Indian music and self-improvement. Rajmohan Gandhi (yes, a relation of that Gandhi) was with us for four days, talking to our young people about making the world a better place.
From there to Mumbai, with a performance at the Willingdon Club where I got to sing Love for a crowd of total strangers (an exhilarating feeling, I don’t know why anyone does drugs), and then to Dharamshala, home of the Tibetan community in exile. We drove up twisty, narrow, bumpy, mountain roads, got altitude sickness (everyone is fine), drank our weight in tea and ate our weight in momos (dumplings), and sang for the Dalai Lama at a prayer service for his long life. We came home via Amritsar and its golden temple, and a brief 12-hour layover in Delhi, followed by 24 hours straight on a plane to Chicago. All in all, an amazing experience that I would not change for anything in the world.
Now I’m going back home to sleep for about seven years, lie on the couch with my boyfriend, and watch the new season of The Comeback. Thank you to March for all of your blessings.
