A Model Psychosis: Velada

A Model Psychosis

Track 9. Velada

October, 1962. Back with our hero, now in "Mazatec Country" with Anita, Gordon Wasson and Marina Sabina.

PLAY

I can't take credit for much of this song. I adapted the lyric from a few different translations, the melody is straight from the Smithsonian field recordings. So, I harmonized it. This is the only track I play piano on, with the exception of the overdubbed interlude melody on The Tradition. It's also the very first piece that I started working on for the album, and Jeff Miller's guitar work was the first track recorded.

R. Gordon Wasson's story could be a whole record by itself. He was the vice-president of J.P. Morgan, and became an extremely accomplished amateur mycologist -- thanks to his wife, Valentina. Once again, behind every great man is a great woman. In any case, Gordon is a much more important character in this story than I had time or space to relate. As for Albert, note the Ranz des Vaches motif. The spirit of Maria Sabina and "the little people", I believe, speaks for itself. In volumes.

I hope you can feel something of what it might have been like to be there when you listen to this song, and I apologize for stepping on what might have otherwise been a pretty song by adding some "musical" elements to accomplish this.

lyric

I am a saint woman, says 
I'm a drum
a drum woman, says
I'm a woman born
fallen into the other world
That is your Book
That is your Book
Book of clarity, says
I'm a woman of the breeze

I am a woman who looks in
into the in-sides of things
woman who shouts,
who resounds
a woman torn out of the ground, says
I'm a woman wise in medicine, says
I'm a woman of heaven

woman who thunders 
woman who sounds, says 
Woman of the shooting stars
of a sacred, enchanted place

Because I can swim in the immense 
And I come going from place to place from the origin

Because I come searching beneath the water from the opposite shore
I am the woman who can be torn

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