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Everything, copyright Alma Drake 2023, Creative Commons (Attrib.) Michael and I met in 1999, when I was still married to somebody else, and at the time, I thought to myself, Dammit! I married the wrong guy! And that thought never changed. In 2023 we corrected that oversight, and our first anniversary is just over a [...]

A couple months ago I had a really intense Shamanic journey to visit our local river god, Jahiowa, who gave me some pretty clear marching orders: Write intentionally healing music that expresses the beauty, joy, and comfort of the land, and share it with as many people as you possibly can. It occurred to me [...]

Usually, after I have recorded a bunch of songs, I immediately start making up new ones. I’ve written a few, and some have been used for other things (like The Harmony Tree and In A Garden of Hope recently choired up by the Family Folk Machine), and some of them are … not quite done, [...]

Remember the good old days, when men were men and women didn’t have the right to vote or have their own money? When marriages lasted longer because women were basically slaves with no resources and no rights? Yeah, good times. Not. There are people who think that’s a good idea now being slotted into powerful [...]

There’s a story from the Arthurian cycle that involves a “riddle.” I put riddle in quotes because it really isn’t a big mystery at all. It’s common effing sense, but for thousands of years no white male writers could figure it out. Here’s the question: What do women really want? Well, gosh. This is sooooooo [...]

My shiny new husband has been away for 4 months taking care of parents who are end-of-life stage. It’s got to be done, so he’s there, doing it. Fortunately, or possibly unfortunately, he works “from home,” meaning wherever in the world he is, so he can work from darkest Arkansas as well as from right [...]

Enough with the doom and gloom for a minute; let’s have some fun. A couple years ago my town seemed to have cornered the market on the blackbird population. They were thick as thieves! They were everywhere! And they were funny little muses for me. I wrote two blackbird songs, one because there was a [...]

I’ve been watching a lot of space tv on PBS lately. I’m a huge fan of science documentaries and such, but especially space: cosmology, planetary science, origins of life, exploration, all the things. I love it. It’s my comfort food, I think because of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which was like religion in my house. We [...]

Sometimes our students are our best teachers. A few years ago, I had a guitar and violin student (I love a multi-talented kid) that was one of my favorite people ever. One afternoon, they said to me in a voice filled with wonder, “Music is the wind, and we are the willow tree.” And I [...]

On the night of October 8, 1871, there was a wildfire in Wisconsin that killed 1400 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of forest. The little town of Peshtigo was completely destroyed, leaving a handful of survivors. One survivor was the Reverend Peter Pernin, who left one of the only eye-witness accounts of [...]

So this song is about the sensual magic of books. The first person I ever knew who openly talked about book-sniffing totally admitted to being a “dirty book sniffer.” For him it was a clandestine pleasure, opening a book and breathing in the smell of paper and ink while no one was looking and then [...]

So … my Friend on the River had some interesting things to say when I visited last. Below is the transcript of his … well, sermon, honestly. I think I’d put this up there with the Sermon on the Mount. Pretty powerful stuff. A few big surprises and adjustments that I need to be thinking [...]