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Dancing With Hecate
The new release from Music for the Goddess
Dancing With Hecate, the second CD from Music for the Goddess, has been a journey of discovery for singer/songwriter Wendy Sheridan. "When I started working on the second album, in early 2001, I had a completely different concept and direction for it. It was going to be much more political and much heavier. But then, my mother called me and told me she had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and everything changed."
"Music took a back seat for a couple of years, as I helped her as best I could, living 5 hours away from her. We spent all our free time visiting with her and helping around the house. After her death on the Winter Solstice in 2003, our work wasn't finished, either. We had to get the house we grew up in ready to sell on my dad's behalf. And go through 45 years worth of accumulated stuff. I learned a lot about both my parents during this time, and I also learned a lot about getting rid of clutter."
There are 10 tracks on the album. Wendy talks about them:
Wow. This was something I started almost 20 years ago, when I was just starting to get serious about music as an adult. I used to keep the tape recorder running when I was just fooling around on the synthesizer, and the marimba riff over the chord structure on this track was the seed that I had created way back when. The current version evolved during one of the long nights in 2003, when my husband was out playing a bar gig, and our kid was sleeping in bed; when I had a block of 6 or so hours to myself in the studio. I didn't want to clutter it up with words, so I just kept the vocal part to vowel sounds. I call this number "Enya goes to the disco".
This song pretty much sums up my life over the past few years. Hecate is a deity that I really hadn't had much interaction with on a conscious level .Of course, I had heard of her during my studies of Greek mythology; mostly in conjunction with the story of Jason and Medea. She's not given a particularly good rap in that story, by the way. But dealing with all the chaos in our personal lives, and the outer chaos and uncertainty in the world at large, I was feeling drawn to her. As I studied about her, I realized that I had been moving in her sphere of influence for quite some time. The art to "dancing" with Hecate is to see the good as well as the bad, to recognize the crossroads when you come to them and to choose the correct path.
Of course, I'm talking about the Male aspect of Deity in general, and not Michael Flateley. Lord of the Dance explicitly refers to Shiva (as that is one of his names, Nataraj, I believe, means "Lord of the Dance"). And the "dance" meaning the physical incarnation of our current lives. The lyrics actually refer to a magickal experience I had when I attended my first Starwood Festival in 2000, where I was introduced to the three aspects of masculine Deity that corresponded to the three aspects of feminine Deity. I decided to call these the Squire or Knight (or Warrior), corresponding to the Maiden; the Father, corresponding to the Mother; and the Sage, the masculine counterpart to the Crone. At some point, I suppose I'll write a more formal essay about this, but for now, the song will have to suffice.
Production notes: Rob Lame plays guitar and also co-produced this track. Lyrics Listen to the entire track at Myspace.com
This is my Ostara song, and I wrote it shortly after producing Goddess Mandala, so it didn't make it onto the first album. However, we added it to the live set almost immediately, because it could be played as a jig. When Jeff Kalmar was in the band, he would play the fiddle on this tune, and we added "Morrison's Jig" (a traditional Irish jig) to the set, and it was always well received by the audiences wherever we played. The album version is slower than how we used to play it live, and is more in keeping with the tempo of my original composition. The chorus by itself has been used as an Ostara ritual chant, and that's what it was intended for, actually.
Production notes: Wendy plays the cello, bass and keyboards on this track. Lyrics mp3 Sample
I wrote these lyrics shortly after my mother told me she wasn't continuing on her chemotherapy and that her oncologist gave her six more months to live. I was uncomfortable about showing the lyrics to her, and I never did. I regret that now. I don't remember if I sent the lyrics to Rob before or after she died, asking him if he was up for writing some music for this song. His mother passed away over a decade before, and I remember how it affected him, and that he would grok what I was trying to accomplish with this song. Our working title was "Song for Mom" I think it maybe took him 2 days to come up with the music for it. Maybe less. It took us a little while longer to get together and record the "songwriter version" . I know it was available for my mother's memorial service in May of 2004. When I wrote the lyrics, I had parts that were applicable to a woman and parts that were applicable to a man. . This song took the longest to record of all the entire album. As you can tell by comparing the "songwriter version" to the final version, we pulled out all the stops in terms of production. The voice at the end of the song is that of my mother. It was her voicemail message, and the last recording we have of her voice. It's a little ironic that she left such a message, especially considering her atheist leanings. I regret that she never got a chance to hear it.
Production notes: Rob Lame plays guitar and bass on this song. Wendy plays cello and keyboards. Produced by Rob Lame and Wendy Sheridan. Lyrics MP3 Sample
This is the first Pagan song that I ever wrote, so it's going back 15 or 20 years in the catalog. It's not a terribly profound song, but it's fun. It's about going out under the Full Moon and practicing "fertility rites" (nudge, nudge).
Production notes: Wendy plays 6 and 12-string acoustic guitars. Lyrics MP3 Sample
This song came to me quickly, but it was extremely painful to write. The lyrics were written after my friend Margaret died of a heart attack in (I think) 2000, and the words just sat around, waiting. The music was composed on September 23, 2001, after visiting the still-smoldering remains of the World Trade Center in New York City, less than three weeks after the destruction on Tuesday, September 11 , 2001. It took another year or so for me to realize the poem I wrote for Margaret fit the melody I wrote for Tuesday's Lament, and I combined the two. I had some input from Daveed Korup in the summer of '03 that helped me with the rhythm tracks. I didn't realize that I had written a swing bass line and that one musical term helped me to refine the drums and turn it into the blues/jazz song that it wanted to be. The coincidences during the recording and mixing of this song are interesting, and just happened that way - they weren't planned: I recorded the final tracks during the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and finished mixing the song on 9/11/2005. One thing you may notice if you listen very carefully: in the third verse, you may hear an airplane in the vocal track. That's because there WAS an airplane flying over the house when I was recording it. I didn't hear it when I was recording, because I had headphones on, and was singing; only later, during the mixing phase, did I hear the plane. I thought I'd leave it in, especially considering the subject for the song. And the airport is Newark Airport, too, the same place the planes originated on 9/11.
Production notes: Wendy plays bass and cello. Lyrics MP3 Sample
I wrote "Uruk" to be the chant we use to create sacred space and transport participants back in time to the city of Uruk at the beginning of the "Shapatu of Ishtar" - the ritual drama performed by Hands of Change Coven . Our director, and coven sister, L'Espiranse, suggested to me a couple of years ago, that the chant would make a good round. As I was recording this, I experimented, and, indeed L'Espirance was right. This recording came together very quickly - it was the easiest song of the entire album for me to record. I think I got all the basic tracks and arrangements down in about 4 hours, and then just required some clean up on another day. I had been playing the melody on the cedar flute for about a year, while waiting for software to download or install, mostly, so when I picked it up and started playing, I was able to record the flute part in one take. The spoken words are from Betty Meador's Inanna: Lady of Largest Heart This song is also at the Bardic Circle at the Witches' Voice
Production notes: Wendy plays cedar flute. Lyrics
This is another song from the "Shapatu of Ishtar" drama, and it's the chant to accompany Ishtar into Uruk. When I listen to this, I see a hot and dusty marketplace in an ancient city, with crowds of women and men on the sides of a great procession: Men beating huge drums, dancers, elephants, and Ishtar, being carried on a large palanquin. Accompanying me in the Ishtar Chorus are my family, Rich and Ariel Sheridan, and coven sisters, Donna "Belladonna" Juszva, Christine "Cassandra" Catalano, and Anne "Gazelle" Portine.
Production notes: Wendy plays bass. Lyrics MP3 Sample
When my coven brother, Joe D. passed away, also from cancer, I was asked to perform the song at his funeral. I sang the "man" version there, and it was the most difficult performance of my life. It's difficult to sing when you're crying, and I was fighting back tears throughout the whole song. My audience didn't have that prohibition, and it was also a new experience to facilitate cathartic grieving.
Production notes: Rob Lame plays guitar and bass on this song. Wendy plays cello and keyboards. Produced by Rob Lame and Wendy Sheridan. Lyrics mp3 sample
General production notes: The recording was done in Wendy's home studio, using Acid Pro 5 as the recording and mixing platform, and loop libraries from Sony, including loops from Rudy Szarzo, Steve Tibbetts, and BetaMonkey. Mastering and reproduction was done by DiscMakers