Voices like dancing oil on a hot pan (and photos)

It’s funny looking back now, deep into the editing process and so many layers more understanding than who and where I was back then. Even listening to the earlier recordings, I can hear a difference in our voices, this sort of dancing oil on a hot pan quality that, as we grew into the story and ourselves more and more, became a harmonious and rich hum.

When we started this process I knew there would be something magical to come of it, but there was no way to see the story before it unfolded. And once our travels were done, there we sat with organized piles of recordings, waiting to be pieced together. 

We tried writing scripts to get the narration off the ground, to fill in the gaps and weave the narrative together. As it turns out, Hollywood isn’t missing much by missing me, and reading from a script is not one of my many talents. And as we tried and stumbled and got frustrated and laughed our way through, we came to the conclusion that we need to just tell the story. And in order to do that, we need to tell each other all the stories. 

And so we set a schedule. We spent hours on the phone telling each other the stories from the trip, remembering more details with each other’s help, and seeing the stories flesh themselves out a bit. And we planned a gathering. A gathering of our physical selves, and a gathering of all the chapters, all the cascading lines of poetry, everything we had accumulated, and we sat down together to record the narration as its own entity. 

We danced through our memories, creating a solid bridge, a clear pathway, around which our recordings from the trip could grow as wildflowers, adding beauty and form and natural reason to the road. And it was a fucking trip on its own. 

We dipped back into all the feelings we had along the way, with a broader perspective and a bit of sage retrospect. And just like when we were traveling, doubts and fears arose and washed away. My greatest doubt, like it was the whole time, was around whether or not we were doing the story justice. How could we tell the tale in a way that honors the story as it wants to be told?

And at the last moment of the last session, with a pregnant pause between us indicating “is it done?,” before I could even complete that thought, she was there with me. Mary Magdalene set her hand on my shoulder and told me it was done. 

Well, that part was done anyway. Here we are coming up on one year, and the editing just takes time. So I want to say a big thank you to everyone we met along the way and everyone waiting patiently for this to emerge, and the biggest thank you to Larkin who is doing the heavy lifting with all the technological sides of this. We are diligently within the story, letting her birth herself through the sometimes quite tedious process of stitching moments together to bring different dimensions of the story together. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Our recording studio!

Our guest star chapter 7

Photoshoot outtakes 😍

Good luck led us to celebrate having finished all the recordings - dancing down the sun and welcoming the stars with Red Rocks and Kaleo