Shifts and Songs
Releasing my first music album! And contemplating on the shifts in my creative focus
It is that time again…the time of shifts. I can feel it coming on, like an echo, but actually kind of the opposite of an echo, like something reverberating from the future, calling me to continue along a new path.
This newsletter has been quiet for a moment, because instead of the world of written words, I have been in the world of sounds, and I needed to dedicate some time to that. Perhaps this is news for some of you who know me more from the realms of visual art and design, but I have been creating music for most of my life, from the moment when I played around on the old electric organ we had in my childhood room when I was six years old and managed to find the melody of “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” to now, 27 years later, when the most consistent performances I do is to sing that exact same song for my child most evenings (though some evenings they want to hear the troll song, or the trash truck song, instead.)
With most of my adult, and professional life, having focused so much on the visual world, music has held a bit of a secret background position in my life. But it has always been there. I have notebooks filled with songs, and some music notebooks where I have written down sheet music for piano, either as long elaborate melodies or just a few simple notes. Over my life, there were moments when the music would come to me and I would write a song here and there. I didn’t do it very consistently but overtime it has added up to about 25 songs and counting in my notebooks. I mostly wrote music in tough times, in periods of deep shifts. Music was what most held me, through breakups and breakdowns and all kinds of emotional turbulences. This happened again over this past spring and summer, where I found myself unable to create much else, except music. Somehow, I didn’t have energy to sit by my computer or work on writing or visuals, but I did have energy to sit by my piano or ukulele.
Overtime, as I got more and more songs finished, it felt like the music started to scream out to me to release it, to just get it out into the world, and unless I worked on getting it out, I was not allowed to rest, I just kept hearing it calling inside of me.
I have understood that that’s how creativity usually works for me: there can be quite a long plateau inbetween, like a stiller period where I don’t really express a lot but am busy living and being. And then there suddenly comes a push or a burst, as if from nowhere. But actually the pressure has simply been building up for a while. I just haven’t noticed it until it starts bursting out and just begs to be recognized and worked with and shared into the world in the form of an expression of some kind. And now, this happened with my music. I had to right that imbalance that has existed my whole life: it was time for music to have center stage in my life for a moment, and over this spring and summer I have been working on recording and editing a few of my songs into a collection.
So now, in the end of July, I am releasing my first album, Songs of Longing, featuring 13 of my original songs. This is an album that came into being in the unfolding of life. Some songs were written already in the tumultuous years of my twenties, while others were written more recently, in postpartum pain, while processing my past experiences, or simply floating in an emotion that wanted to be expressed through music. All the songs are quite different, but they have a shared type of energy. They are all from times when I was awakened into life, through love, through loss, through longing.
Here’s a video where you can hear an excerpt of a few songs:
You can find the album by searching for my name, Minnamari, on most streaming platforms (Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, and others), or purchase a digital album on my Bandcamp if you want to have the audio files and a PDF-booklet with lyrics, visuals and stories behind some songs. But as a reader of this newsletter, please send me a message if you would like a free download code for the digital album instead of purchasing it, I have a few to share and would love to share it to some of the people who are so patiently reading my words despite how much stuff you might already get into your inbox.
With this shift into music, there might be a shift going on with this newsletter as well. I love going deep in my longer written pieces, but find myself at a time when that is simply not what my energy wants to do. I still enjoy having this space to express. But perhaps I will have to keep it a bit shorter, or transition into having more of a “traditional newsletter setup” where I use this space to share what I’ve been up to, with some images from everyday life and words about my process. As always, let’s just see how it all wants to flow out…and leave space for it to do so.
Wishing you a lovely end of summer/winter depending on where you are. Hope your own life has space to flow the way it wants to…
P.S. If you do want a code for a free digital album download, simply reply to this email or comment on this post. But do it soon, as I only have a limited amount of codes to hand out.