Day 4 of Living On The Edge

It was truly as it sounds. I stood on a great unknown precipice. There was a foreboding in my soul, a restlessness I couldn’t define. I had made three albums in three years and here we were headed for a fourth in four. What do I have left to say? Who have I become in that time? Every artist asks at some point, “did anyone hear me at all? Who am I if the songs never get heard?” I am Appalachian, but I am also living in this present moment with all of you. The world is churning; the world is burning. I could no longer ignore the fire, I could no longer write only about the past, trying to describe myself in my stories. We are all together in this mess and although I have been sitting comfortably on a fence, art is meant to ask hard questions in hard times and to look injustice in the eye. I wrote Centralia, a true story of a fire that had been burning underground in Pennsylvania for decades, which will continue to burn for another 250 years. I then penned Albatrosses, trying to shake the monkey off my back but the monkey was on me and I started to lose my way and wrestle with the first writing block of my life. And then we began to live on the edge. My producer D.W. Fearn set us up in the studio for four extended days in a row, and the experiment began. I would come into the room with a basic idea, a song written the night before, usually at midnight, with loose lyrics and chords, mixed in with my restless dreams. When you have no time to curate who you are, all you have left is what is really there, true honesty and no cover. I walked into the studio with The Machine and the amazing musicians in the room helped me speak truth to power and truth to my music, and bring alive a desire to push back against my root system of safety. I had a more incendiary title in the beginning and eventually performed it live and began receiving aggressive emails and phone calls with threats of exposure and doxxing in my small town. I wrote My Mouth Is a Gun to myself and to my friends, who had held secrets for harm done when we were girls and just becoming women, never realizing how important those words would feel as we watched political figures hide abuse and refuse to look at women who had finally found the strength to use their voices. As I told more truths more songs came, some from old places and parts of me and some from new places. I wrote Healing Time on the fourth night, exhausted by days of recording and nights of writing, hoping there would be something the next day to sink our teeth into. Healing Time was written as an ode to my dad/stepdad about his true holler life and all the crazy food I grew up eating including, smoked trout from a can, potted meat and fried bologna, but also about how the simplicity of that man. Time had healed me completely from the chaos that had been my early life. I drove straight home from Pennsylvania, to see him. That day, I received the call of his unexpected passing, and everything went black. In many ways I didn’t know what I had created. Grief overtook my life and the music faded. When asked what I had made, I didn’t know. To listen to the songs now, I can see where I was headed and why. I was becoming a new me, I had entered a new era of truth, I was honoring my dad, I was saying that I believe in humanity and justice and that the risk of being seen for all my parts and pieces will not sever me from my past or prevent me from learning and growing and shining light into darkness. And if the me I have become disrupts a thread that has tied me to another because of these beliefs, then I must untangle the weave in order to honor myself, and speak for others, to live on the edge of everything, everything that really matters. With love, Corrie Lynn