🌈 winter magic & beginnings ✨
my music video on tv (!), plus breathwork & ephemera
hello my loves -
Last love blast of 2024!
Per usual topline below & some details below the jump.
“I Forgive You…” music video airing on TV in NM next week! Ch 26 in ABQ on Jan 1 2025 7p.
Music takedown update: Some music is down from streaming, and more to come/go. I am leaving a couple songs from each record up, mostly because I’m not trying to erase myself from the music world as it is, nor trying to be invisible 😂. {no details below on this one!}
I Am Here (A Christmas Song) - a story of winter magic & beginnings
Breathwork Meditations from 2024 - a number of meditations I’ve produced for David Elliott, which you can purchase & use for home practice.
5 Things - Solstice edition
I love you!
I hope you’re finding ways to stay in your center and not let life/everything/“the bastards” get you down.
I’ve noticed lately it takes me lots of extra effort to stay in my own self and not feel completely defeated and paralyzed by the suffering and current state of our world, so if that’s you too, I feel you and I am with you, I am praying and daydreaming and taking bubble baths and donating money in my little corner of the universe for all of us.
all my love for whatever you need, xxxooo
Kathleen
“I FORGIVE YOU…” MUSIC VIDEO ON TV!
WEDS JAN 1, 2025 | 7PM MST
Channel 26 in Albuquerque is airing the music video for “I Forgive You But I’m Still F*cking Mad” on Weds. Jan. 1, 2025 at 7p! This is the start time for a marathon of New Mexico artists’ music videos, and my video is 11th in the lineup. So, it might be a bit after 730p MST when it airs.
Tune in to Channel 26 directly if you’re in ABQ or watch online from anywhere in the world using this link. Click on Channel 26—it’s the 2nd one down on the left— “Local Origination - Comcast Channel 26”!
Thank you to Travis Fowler, my director for this project, and Al LaFleur, my graphic designer, for telling me about this opportunity & making it happen! They have a production company called Slice of Santa Fe & are super pro and fun to work with.
I AM HERE (A CHRISTMAS SONG)
winter magic, & beginnings, & trusting
Listen/download for free here.
I started writing this song in 2010 during my second winter living in New York. If you’ve ever been in New York City between Thanksgiving and New Years, you know the magic— twinkling lights, garlands and tinsel and ornaments in every shop window, the vanilla cookie smell of roasted cashews and the earthiness of roasted chestnuts coming from every cart on any street corner, ringing bells everywhere as the Salvation Army begs your pennies and nickels when you walk by.
One Saturday December evening, the snow floated down as I sat at my favorite Steinway grand piano in a dark blue corner studio on the fourth floor of the NYU practice rooms on 4th and Lafayette (I used to sneak in with my boyfriend’s practice badge). This song tiptoed its way into my consciousness, and I played with the modal chord changes and sunk into the mystical feelings of Christmas and the Winter Solstice. The steam heater clanked next to me, and the snowflakes fell past the fourth story window on my left.
I didn’t finish the song then—it remained an exploration—and then I forgot about it, and went through a break up and left New York and moved back to LA and started my new/old LA life and met the man who would eventually become my husband and we moved to Venice Beach and I quit my day job in order to start making LOVE SUPERSTAR.
In December 2012, two years after starting this song and a month after quitting my job at MTV, I visited New York. I was bursting with the possibility of finally being able to make music all the time and do what I want—no more 9 to 5 for me, no more boss, and a whole week in New York City during December!
I stayed with a dear girlfriend in Park Slope in Brooklyn—crown moldings, hardwood floors, high ceilings. We drank chai in the mornings at breakfast at her dining table and talked about music and Mother Mary, and we met up in the West Village at the Pig & The Whistle one evening for hot crispy shoestring rosemary fries and bracing cocktails.
The city shined with its holiday finery as always—tinsel and baubles in shop windows, twinkling lights, Christmas trees in every lobby and living room. I wore red Christmas bow earrings from my grandma, and bought a set of miniature gingerbread cookie cutters from a Park Slope kitchen store, and Libbie {the dear friend} and I spent hours making miniature gingerbread cookies one snowy evening.
The next morning I had her house to myself, so I grabbed my steaming cup of chai and sat down at the Steinway piano with my notebook. The Christmas tree sparkled, the sun shone in the east-facing windows, and my heart glowed with winter and possibility and New York and holiday magic. As I played through some Christmas sheet music that was already out, I remembered the song I had started two years prior. I picked it up again and was able to finish it there, making a quick recording on my phone.
Once I was back in Venice a few days later, I recorded it for real on my Baldwin spinet in our drafty office. I didn't know how to record on my own yet, but I figured now that I’d quit my job at MTV to be a full-time musician, I’d better figure it out, and fast. I didn’t have any sound equipment—literally not even one microphone or cable—and I had only ever recorded in professional studios before, with professional engineers and producers who were in charge of things like microphones and cables.
But, I didn’t let that stop me.
I stood on my creaky, wobbly piano bench and taped two quilts to the walls (for sound dampening) and used the built-in microphone and GarageBand on my computer to record. As I tried to record, the piano bench creaked, and the quilts kept falling down—even duct tape is no match for gravity and a heavy quilt made by Mom!—and between the quilts randomly falling and the piano solo that my fingers couldn’t quite grasp, I had to record over and over and over to get that one perfect take. I didn’t know enough about audio back then to edit takes together yet.
Eventually, after what felt like five hundred years, I got the piano solo right—no bumbles!—AND the quilts stayed up long enough to get a solid piano take. The sun was quickly sinking toward the western horizon as I sang into my computer for the vocal takes. I had spent all day working on music, and I had recorded my own songs for the very first time, all by myself!
You can hear the piano bench creaking in this recording, if you listen for it ;-)
The next day, I added some bells—for that Christmasy feeling!—and did some very light mixing and released it as a single to my mailing list.
And then, in 2019, Shawn and I were living in Santa Fe, and I had a proper studio of my own (The New Barn), and I re-discovered this recording file on a hard drive. I re-mixed and mastered the track, tweaking, adding a little bit of this and that, and I re-released it that winter.
I listen now, and though it’s not my “best” work—it is home recording FOR SURE, and I could point out a zillion things I’d do differently today—it represents the beginning of something.
I began to trust my voice and my instincts at a whole new level in that tiny, cold office in Venice in December of 2012, and who knows if that wasn’t the tiny little invisible seed from which MEDICINE would eventually grow.
You can download it for free through the rest of the month, if you want to and don’t already have it.
Here’s to winter magic and beginnings and trusting.
✨ 🌲 ❄️
BREATHWORK MEDITATIONS
For a few years, I’ve been producing breathwork meditations for David Elliott, a teacher & healer Shawn & I have known for many years. I love doing it—every meditation is its own thing, and it’s a delight to create in service of health and healing.
Below are a few meditations that David and I (and Shawn, too—he’s often the sample breather in the track!) have made over the years. Links go to David’s online store to purchase & download.
If you’ve never done breathwork, but are curious, you can still enjoy any of these. There’s always a nice introduction where David explains how it all works, what to do, etc.
Chasing Time - to help you release some of the effects of trauma, which can throw you out of balance with time - whether you are stuck in the past or holding anxiety about the future. This one is yum, and also a little shorter than others!
Dealing with Grief & Loss - This recording takes you deeply into the grieving process and organically helps you let go of things you cannot control - i.e. the grief and sadness from losses including death. Even though this subject matter may be more comfortably ignored, we can never truly avoid the inevitable. Especially at this time of year, I find this one particularly supportive—both Shawn & I have been breathing to it regularly this month.
Fertility - More than just for humans wanting to conceive more humans, this is for nurturing & nourishing any kind of creative expression. I always feel very inspired and creative after doing this one!
Healing for the Masculine - to bring healing and balance to the masculine energies in all of us. This one was SUPER fun to make—Shawn & I got to play a huge Native American drum for some of the sounds on this meditation!
There are many others we’ve made, but I’ll keep it to this little list for now.
Love to hear your experiences if you breathe to any of these.
💖
5 THINGS, SOLSTICE EDITION
Doe, A Deer, A Female Reindeer: The Spirit of Winter Solstice - the pagan & feminine roots of Christmas
Tomten: The Lore of the Christmas Gnome - an inspiring & magical booklet I bought up in Grand Marais a few years ago. This booklet is an adaptation of Danica Boyce’s Fair Folk podcast episode “Gnome for Christmas” from 2019.
The Lungs of Grief, The Guts of Joy - on grief by the fantastic folk singer Creekbed Carter
Winter II by Ryan Marvel - piano winter songs currently on rotation
Year End Review for People Who Are Too Old or Too Tired for This Shit - by Chela Davison
bonus: On the Mythic Power of Christmas - Alexander Shaia on the Robcast
bonus bonus: Sufjan Stevens’ Yule Log 2023 (all of his Christmas music, plus a yule fire in the hearth!)
I LOVE YOU!
MAKE YOUR ART!
WE NEED IT, SO BAD!
JUST KEEP SWIMMING!!!
🌈