Sara Rachele should have been in London, recording her latest musical project – but, hey, we know how that story went in this year. So Sara Rachele found herself at home instead. At home and musing on her folk origins – and songs she’d known nearly all her life. Songs like ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’She says it was the birth of an alternative project: “I wanted to sing some folk songs in the studio. And now, after being home, I thought, ‘while things are weird, keep music going.’” Fortunately she had the perfect home recording location to give her the live feel she wanted to imbue the songs with – her recently purchased new home is an abandoned church in rural Tennessee.
What’s the attraction of the Dylan classic though? Well, Sara Rachele explains it works for her on many levels: ” “I’m not sleepy, and there is no place I’m going to,” is one of the lines of this Bob Dylan song, which touches me each time I hear it; there is a meditative space here for me. This moment is one of the reasons I wanted to record it . Music is a soft and easy space for me to deal with my emotions and I find when I perform, it is one of the quietest places I enter – a true place of stillness within a song.
I was in a course years ago with the wonderful songwriter Livingston Taylor, and he was reciting this song, I remember so clearly – this part:
“Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship
My senses have been stripped
My hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wandering
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade”
And I thought to myself, ‘If I can just write one thing… just one song that someone will recite out loud in a class like this someday…’ This song just possesses a bit of the magic of life, the Argonaut’s quest and a search for meaning. I think so often about this kind of thing, and this song rings in my head, in my old professor’s voice as he paces around shouting, enunciating these words so precisely. I suppose there’s something hypnotic about the lyrics, when they’re this good. I suppose I’m still trying to write the song. I’m still trying to answer the dancing spell.”
‘Mr Tambourine Man‘ will be released on November 13th on Rachele’s Angrygal Records.
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