I write music and play guitar, violin, autoharp, and singing saw.
Buck Again
2006
I wrote and arranged this collection of 13 songs about hospitals, paying rent, mental illness, goats, encounters with strangers, the patriarchy, living in a small town, suicide, and joy anyway.
Thank you, Butchy Fuego for recording it exactly like I needed at the time. Thanks Carbon Records, for letting me on your experimental label and never calling me folk music.
Listen to Buck Again HERE
Bucked
2005
I played 4 songs spontaneously in an abandoned strip mall in upstate New York while driving back from a film festival. Filmmaker Jem Cohen was there, encouraged me to play, and recorded it. His presence and his uncanny ability to see the big picture in the tiny moments shines through here. Listen for the sound of a Polaroid being shot at the end.
I liked this moment and put it out as an ep.
Listen to Bucked HERE
Soundtrack: Los Trivinos De Huasco
Mirror twins Jessye McDowell and Megan McDowell are, respectively, an artist and a literature translator. Once, they made a film together. It is about a family of artists living in Chile. It is also about living the kind of life you want. I wrote the soundtrack while I had a high fever in the backseat of a car driving from Chicago to Tennessee.
Listen to the soundtrack HERE
Watch the film HERE
Bill Morrison, Little Orphant Annie
2016
This is a song an poetry reading recorded on an original sound-o-graph machine at Third Man Records in Nashville. The reading of the poem, Little Orphant Annie accompanied the silent and decayed film presented and preserved by filmmaker Bill Morrison. It showed at the Library of Congress Mary Pickford Theater.
James Whitcomb Riley is the poet Laureate of Indiana, my home state. As a child, we all had to learn this poem by heart, so this project had special meaning for me.
Styches, Demonstrative Recordings and Zeta Tapes
2007, 2011
Styches is a collaborative project with musician and poet Kyle Hamlet. We collected songs we heard in dreams and fragments of songs that never came to fruition, and stitched them together into something cohesive. Each record was recorded and mixed on a Tascam cassette 4 track in total seclusion over the course of 3-4 days in two locations. We recorded 2 records this way under the names Ginger Handling and Jackie Paper.
Thank you to the Jones family for lending us their home on a hill called Love Circle for one recording. Thank you to the John Family for use of their pool house for the other recording. Zeta Tapes is named in loving memory after Zeta the cat.
Listen to Styches HERE
LYLAS, Do You Believe In Blood
YEAR
LYLAS is an ever-evolving group of musicians performing the ideas of musician and poet Kyle Hamlet. I worked with LYLAS from 2006-2010. This is my favorite LYLAS project that I worked on. On this record, I played violin, sang, arranged the strings.
Listen to dybib HERE
