It’s 3:24 in the morning and by all accounts I should be sleeping. My health is challenged and my workload in law and music is beyond belief in magnitude with deadlines and priorities that are not my personal own. And yet here I am.
As a lawyer I have come to realize that my role is in the middle. I am the intermediary negotiating for my clients to get them what they want, what they need, what they aspire to, what finish line they wish to run to. None of it is mine, but I do take satisfaction that I am effective in my job. That’s something right?
But where am I in all this? In the quiet of the middle of the night, I find my time to write, to ponder and write some more. I am always looking for a way to really get it out, to say it, to especially stop suppressing it. The hard reality that my major source of stress is the delay to be me because of my life as the intermediary. The waiting is so painful. Watching everyone else get where they want to be, people I helped, the people I gave my entire energy and attention to over and over again at my expense just to fulfill my promises as the intermediary – painful and necessary. No complaints. Just stark truth.
And then my true self has to be revealed. It has rammed through the door and it has stood in front of the all too familiar microphone and the epiphanies start erupting. The chorus won’t be denied – it keeps asking – “Why must we fix what never was broken yet resist what is shattered or stands on the edge. Promises made, we still leave unspoken, as we listen for the unwritten tune – it’s the song of the mermaid, under a desert moon.”
And then guess what? Suddenly it’s not just the original song that Mike Mattingly and I wrote 20 plus years ago. Now it is a cinematic re-start, born in Studio Sage with the assistance of my son Cameron Miles Lavi-Jones and my dear precious producer cellist friend Phillip Peterson with the musings of my forever person Maurice Jones on bass. We make it up as we go along in the studio. Most of the time I sit quietly as they work. I chime in when I need to in order to make sure we stay on course – for once – my course. Until.
They say it’s your turn to stand in front of the mic and get it all out – what you really meant to say. And the eruption of what I have kept so tightly inside of me for so long can no longer be denied. It doesn’t ask for permission and I get it out in one take because it has known forever what must come now. “Confused and rejected, she responded with questions, her story it seems was more bitter than sad, the enticement of love could have held her together, she gave of her heart until good turned to bad.”
And there it is, showing up yet again in song – melody and lyric epic at this point.
Back to the now. The issue of the intermediary, giving of my heart until the insomnia and fear and disillusionment about love and misplaced expectations just erupts at 3.33 AM on a Sunday night to Monday morning. When will the disappointment end? When is it my turn?
And I realize again – that repeated epiphany. No one hands us anything. We take our turns. We make the most of them. Because life is messy and beautiful and lovely and forgiving and relentless and horrible and honest and full of lies and stunningly cinematic and dark and grey and repeatedly full of lessons we keep needing to learn over and over again as “we wait in the desert and dream of the sea.”
It’s official April 2, 2021 - is the release date for Mermaid Under A Desert Moon the song and lyric video.