On The Beekeeper

"The Beekeeper is musically inspired by the fact that the piano has realized that she has an organ - with my right hand on her organ and my left hand on her piano keys, I have been changed by the relationship between these two beautiful creatures, the Bosendorfer piano and the B3 Hammond organ."

"I've always been drawn to beekeeping, the culture of honey, the sensuality of how it is created. If I see beekeepers, I pull over."

"I don't usually talk about what the songs are about, because they're about many, many things,"

"The storm is on the horizon. It's coming, this massive force. It can be emotional or physical — or all those things."

"I approached the last record from the Native American part of my bloodline. The only way to address the severing that was happening in America itself was to go into myself as a Christian woman. If Jesus' teachings are being hijacked and manipulated by politicians, then I must therefore go back as a daughter of the Christian church into that system and that symbolism and those allegories."

"I'm not writing The Da Vinci Code. There are a lot of mythic archetypes that I'm playing with within The Beekeeper. Different queen bees of different mythologies, whether it's Sekhmet or Kuan-Yin or Freya or Queen Maeve."

"He began to understand the balance between nature itself, and that the bees were holding this sacred space of sexuality, procreation that goes on in the garden. Reading the bee master's account, I began to see the beekeeper as this creative force, this neutral force in our story. Not a force to be worshiped or obeyed, mind, but one whose guidance is meant only to illuminate, to inform, to recognize the interlocking importance of all the players in the cycle of life. "

“As I began to realize that the gardens personified the different relationships a woman could have, the songs started coming and coming. At a certain point I was talking dictation.  I had to stand back and let them show me the shape they were creating."

"I saw a painting by Seurat - Seated Woman With A Parasol - in a book on Impressionism. I was drawn to it and I started to think about Victorian women and then some women today, the type of women who don't want to intimidate their partner and so allow themselves to become reduced so the other person can feel confident."

"Parasol is a song about deep betrayal and how this woman survives this experience without becoming victimized in the end, by being able to transform herself. And as the song says "If I'm the seated woman with the parasol I'll be the only one." There will always be someone who feels trapped in a situation like the seated woman with the parasol."

"I like the idea that a modern woman of today felt a kindred spirit in the seated woman with a parasol. Because although our woman has a bank account, has a job, isn't forced to marry anybody. She's been in this relationship and she doesn't want to lose it, on one level, but realizes that she must because she's not valued or appreciated by this person. She realizes that she has to face this."

"Yesterday I spent hours on 'Sweet the Sting'; from playing the piano riff over and over to listening to it on my crap tape recorder, to masking changes and incorporating them. The story started evolving soon after the B3 Hammond organ, whom I have named 'Big Momma," was delivered. Every time I entered the room in the morning to begin my practice time, Big Momma would be humming. Yes, of course her power had been left on, but I'm talking about the kind of humming you detect in a girlfriend after she's had a romantic evening. Turns out Big Momma has a boyfriend. Another organ, specifically another B3 organ. This romance led me to the story of two B3 players, one female, the other male, whose erotic dance revolves around each impressing the other by how well they play their own organ."

"Elixirs and Herbs is a place that the passion that this woman has for her beliefs or the man that she loves, for the direction that humanity is going, is very much where she is exploring and allowing herself not only to heal what are wounds, but to allow her wounds to express themselves and this doesn't always have to be a place of victimization this sometimes is a place of being able to confront something that is out of balance and it is an ancient practice that the Bee shaman have been working with for thousands of years they work with a tradition that forces you to look at those places that may need to be stung and there's a song on this record in the Herbs and Elixirs garden called Sweet The Sting and in order for you or I to gain the sweetness, wisdom does not come without the sting."

"This can be a place of being able to confront something that's out of balance. And it's an ancient practice that the bee shamans have been working with for thousands of years. They work with a tradition that forces you to look at those places that may need to be stung. And in order for you or for I to gain the sweetness... wisdom does not come without the sting."

"I've just finished a song on my new album called 'The Power Of Orange Knickers' and the word that came up was "terrorist". Tricky one! What rhymes with "terrorist"? Assonance is your best friend here. I thought about how people are using that word right now - whether it's people who run kingdoms or are killing people, or both. Maybe it could mean domestic terrorism, somebody you let in your house or your room or your body - invasion! Then I put the word "kiss" in there to create a paradox as it's the furthest thing from "terrorist". I've always been a John Lennon person. My husband is a Paul McCartney person but I love a twist in the story. I love the tension of opposites. I love dancing with the devil - but the devil's a dictionary, not a dick!"

"I started to think about the word terrorist. It's a word you hear several times a day now. I started to think about what being a terrorist can mean in different situations. I wanted to explore the realm of personal invasion. Now this would be an invasion by someone you know personally, not a stranger. We all know about strangers being filled with hatred -- strangers who lash out against a government or an ideal. As a result, this stranger kills innocent people, tragically, people you may know personally. But when there is an intimacy between two people and one person starts to feel invaded by the other person, that is personalized terrorism. As we all know, the battleground between two lovers, or two friends, or two co-workers can be vicious. Painful. Heartbreaking. And bloody. I started to think about the weapons that might be used in this kind of battle, and as I kept digging for an answer, I stumbles into the Realm of Assonance. I started to think, Okay, what is the paradox of the terrorist? And Assonance, that beautiful creature, came to my aid and whispered, 'Kiss.' And sure enough, we have all felt invaded by a lingering kiss, for good or ill. But I had to find terrorism not just in a relationship of a couple -- representing two divided Beings -- but within one Being. After all, isn't that the ultimate discovery, the ultimate pain -- division within the self, the soul from the body, the mind from the heart, wisdom from consciousness, the addiction from the cure, the two Marys . . . divided? The lyrics started to come to me quickly..."

"I was curious about how people were defining what a terrorist was. I wanted to undress the word and really crawl inside the definition of it. People are using it to get the masses to agree with their agendas but it can be a little pill that you're addicted to, or a person. And sometimes, for a woman, it's another woman."

"If we can all begin to start looking more at our lives like a garden and within a garden it has different shapes, I mean yours may not be, um, based on a hexagram concept. The Beekeeper is however, mainly because the cells of the hive itself are based on the principle of the hexagram. For my wisdom and my sort of Tree of Knowledge to expand, I chose to follow my heart so I flowed my husband down to Cornwall, wellie boots and all, this would not have been my first choice. I enjoyed living in cities, but now, over the last few years there is a different rhythm here and the weather is very much a character in this theatre piece of my life, it is a huge part, um, and, the power of it when the gales blow in off the Cornish coast. There is a song Jamaica Inn that I wrote, as I - didn't get trapped but I was just driving down on a beautiful quote unquote beautiful I mean it was raining, it's England. And all of the sudden the gales started to come in and my mind started to wonder and I pulled over on a cliff and I started to think about the story that I had been told by some of the locals where the wreckers would come in when ship had would run aground and take everything and I started to think about this story that was taking over my car in that moment. Jamaica Inn just walked into my Saab and she said 'you might not like my story because I'm not going to tell you how it ends yet and you need to travel it with me and we're going to have to explore your deepest fears.' And I think my deepest fears come down to betrayal in love friendship it's not death, that's not my greatest fear, tragic if it's untimely but it is going to happen to all of us. What always stops me is betrayal and if I betray someone, that scares me too."

"I've been researching and listing words that I like the sound of and look of for the pollination stakes competition. There is a list of hundreds, so to give my mind a break, I had a wander down the back field to the vegetable garden and the greenhouse. I just hung out there, deciding with husband where to put the lavender - anytime there is sun around in England you can't take it for granted, you must bake in it, making yourself the sacrifice, if necessary - just to maybe make it last all day. So, since it was one of those glorious English summer days in the middle of Spring, I played hooky from playing the piano and flirted with the sun. On my way back from the field, with flower choices in my head, Husband headed off to the Arsenal game and I headed to the picnic table where my gardening book was. I passed the studio with the huge barn doors of the big recording room painted in madras, a Tuscan peach, which I had open all morning while practicing. Then bam. There it was... after all these months, I looked at the Bose, she looked at me, and I went right up, turned the tape recorder on, and bam...the chorus to 'Sleeps with Butterflies' was spilling over the keys and I knew she was complete. So after weeks of trying to write my idea of a chorus, the real chorus stepped right up and said, 'T, honey, you just take this down and I'll be off to enjoy some flirting with the sun myself.'"

"Did the day effect this? Did the weather? Sure. If I were in another space, then something as simple as a bird's song changes. Having started a song at one place in the world, say in Bumfuck on the road, then finishing it on a Winter's day - with that soft muted Cornish light putting the m in moody, bringing with it its own references, senses, and perfumes... all of these elements get included in that ever rotating palette."

"The Desert Garden is very much about the crossroads. It's a place where you must make choices, grave choices. This is where are garden of sensuality differs from the Garden of Eden because in a place where the creator is the feminine scribe telling the story, the bard, in our book of genesis, in our 'In the beginning' we as women were encouraged to eat from the tree of knowledge because that is how we could help our pride and our tribe and if we don't then will would be subservient and unequal to the male and therefore cannot help him and cannot serve the pride. As a songwriter and someone who chronicles time, um, I have to feel the pulse of what is current. I was able to include General Joy on the record because I wrote it, um, in July 2004 and recorded it and it was relevant then and it is relevant again now. We are still at war, as of this taping and General Joy is very much a current figure. Or not because there are not a lot of Generals that we would call General Joy and that is the point. General Joy has lost his boys and they have been left behind, he needs a solder girl now that liberty has been gagged."

"Mother Revolution is core. Because the album centres very much around this idea that in order for there to be a continuance of life for the next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation the songs began to speak about if the masses didn't choose to listen to the needs of the next generation then the mothers would need to make a choice which was were the mothers ok about sending their sons off to a war that they may not believe in and I began to understand an internal revolution that is more powerful than thousands of solders, that there is an artillery of the soul and a resolve that I have seen in a concerned mother. The masters have spoken about the complexity of the hives that love living in the orchards I was drawn to it mainly because of the vine and the fruit and the transformation of life. Becoming a mother has brought me my greatest teacher. She is four and we're in communication, we're in harmony, we're in a balance of mother and daughter not me as the authority or her as the precocious child who is totally in control, which is true sometimes, but when we're in balance, we are sharing this dance this sonic dance that the songs have been trying to show me since I was little, but she through her, her music is beginning to show me. And that lives in The Orchard along with the Tree of Knowledge."

"I’ve thought about this a lot since I had my daughter and what I find really disturbing about this global war, is you don’t see any of the world leaders sending their children to be butchered. It’s always someone else’s children, someone else’s blood. In Mother Revolution the woman realises she cannot fight the patriarchy in the way that they fight and she can’t just turn her back either. In order to be effective she has to come up with a new solution. And sometimes the best solution isn’t to throw a bomb at a balloon, it's to pop the balloon with a kitty heel!"

"It's hard to put my finger on it. I think that there is a playfulness that has emerged since I became a mom. I love being a woman and I must say I've never loved being a woman as much as I do now. I'm 41, and I'm loving it. Being a mom healed a lot of wounds. Natasha kicked a lot of demons away when she came out. Kids are able to strike where no-one else can, with the things they say, but they are also able to mend and heal where no-one else can.

"Ribbons Undone is a song that really I guess explains a mother's love, and a fathers love for their daughter. They see their little girl running in the field with their ribbons flying and they're like little flashes of lightning that go by especially when you are in the back field her and you can run and run and run and run and catch butterflies thinking that you can fly like one.

"I was watching Tash run and I started to remember something my mother said to me, she told me years ago. We would look in a mirror and she said 'this woman that I see that you see, this old woman, wrinkled woman, is a stranger to me.' I said 'You are the most beautiful woman I know' and she said that's, don't get distracted by what I am telling you. She said 'That is a stranger to me. Inside I'm running. Inside my legs can carry me. I don't have a heart condition I'm not someone who is in a wheelchair. I am someone who catches the butterflies in my minds eye.' And when I watched my daughter running, I saw my mother. And I began to understand that this case is a distraction sometimes and it tricks us because it can start making us believe that we are old of sprit, not just that the violin case is beat up, but you can begin to believe that the violin has no music to play anymore and that is where you have to go to the tree of knowledge and I tasted my mothers wisdom looking in that mirror. And I see her running now. And my mother will always be running, next to Tash, together hand in hand, and Ribbons Undone is something that I can see myself running along side them."

"The Beekeeper really explores the story from the creative mother's perspective, because we know from the bible the creative father's perspective and in this garden we do not call this the "Garden of Original Sin" we call this "The Garden of Original Sinsuality" you will see when you open up the album, The Beekeeper, which songs live in which gardens and you can take a journey with them. They are their own Garden of Eden, they are their own shape. It is a sonic shape so it is not a physical space. This is a place where male or female can enter its, um, not just emotions of a woman. We all experience disappointment and we all experience transformation and we all experience passion, even if it is not passion for another human being but passion is an essence in itself."

"I think that being a mother has changed me on every level. I think mellow is a curious word because I think that you can sonically make a choice because you want to have a certain effect. Scarlet was very much about Americana and we wanted to have an Original Sinsuality. Now that is called penetrating the patriarchy, that is called highlighting the female prophets that were censored and edited out of the Bible for 2000 years. Now maybe, quite possibly, we decided to make these albums beautiful because they are probably the most political of all the records. When you're going to go after certain leaders and their agendas, sometimes, to be most effective, 'You must be as wise as a serpent but as gentle as a dove.'"

"I’ve always incorporated religious characters into my music, but they’re particularly prevalent in The Beekeeper, because as I was researching it I started to think about how much attention is focused on religion and the need that people have to argue about their beliefs to the point of war. As I started to dissect the ideas and ideologies behind both parties, I found myself going back to the Bible and some of the stories contained within it. Original Sinsuality for example, tells the parallel story of Genesis and suggests it’s not sin you find in the garden, it is Original Sinsuality."

"When I was writing 'Ireland,' I was reading some book a journalist had given me about James Joyce and I was drawn into that fabric that made up his tapestry, his life. There was a spoiled nun who taught him the names of the mountains on the moon. I figured if 'Ireland' was referring to James Joyce, then it needed to have nuns, and if it had nuns, then it needed to have white-collar sadomasochists from Wall Street, and if it had that, then it needed to have Vikings since anywhere you go around Ireland their presence is still felt"

I like my Saab. I like Ireland. We were gathering there for a few weeks in the summer. Strange occurrences happen there. Maybe because the veils are thin. I look up on the hills that surround me and I am mesmerized. All the hassles of daily life freeze their chattering head (aches) as I sit. Drawn into a different kind of drumming that I, strangely enough, can hear. It is faint. But it is hypnotising. I look up and You could say someone has taken a paint brush so that I can barely make out the contour of bodies, the etching of a hero's physique. A hero from Munster being welcomed back in this tribal ceremony---- where beauties of all shapes and sizes sway to the drumming that has now joined with a haunting sound. Distant chanting that is warming the fires. I am not warm or cold. A bard by the fire regales the feats of the last many, many days. He is there. I breathe him in. The festivities of the Tuatha De Danann go into the night. Through the open windows of my room, I can look out on these hills. Sometimes they are quiet and simply act as a blanket for the house and for anyone who comes here to rest, or to write. Ellie smiles as Dunc puts the kettle on. Fresh herbs from the garden mingle, making conversation in porcelain. I leave Ellie and Dunc and a Pomerol Chateau Moulinet in the Kitchen. The stairs carry me back to my open window. I curl up in my duvet and am rocked to the place where our senses are awake. I dream myself awake. The bard reaches for the elements. From ether, From fire. He seduces me with his story. The Tuatha De Danann break camp at dawn. I write this as another promo day begins in the land of Runes and of longboats - longboats that long ago made the Emerald Isle their destination. I don't have a longboat but I do have a Saab.

"You find yourself following the food chain path: you know, change your food, change your path, you are what you eat, Eat Right for Your Blood Type, etc. etc. etc...we've all done it. But if you're like me, then you realize one day that after you've been doing this for a year, your actual blood type is A+, not O. Fucking great

"At first the melody would come and walk with me through the mists in North Cornwall England. I would take this melody back to the Hammond Organ, the B3. I would sit and play with this for hours."

"Soon I began to have to deal with my mother's heart condition and she survived a cardiac arrest in September. Because of this I began thinking about the life cycle and that dying is part of the life cycle."

"Even though I realized this, logically, I couldn't accept the idea of losing my mother emotionally. The song started to become clearer as the days went by and I began to realize that the Beekeeper that had taken my character in the song, to death, to plea"

"Plead for my mother's life, the Queen Bee in the song, little did I know that although my mother would survive and that death did pass her by it would be the last time I saw my brother when I went back to stand by my mother's bedside."

"So life/death has it's own rhythm and it's own rhyme. The Beekeeper really acts as a Shaman, similar to the Medicine Man in the Native American tradition. We have the Beekeeper in the Celtic tradition."

"I've got one song I've just finished which only had a title - 'Martha's Foolish Ginger' - and a chorus: "If those harbour lights had just been half a mile inland who knows what I would have done". I've actually been working on this song for eight years but couldn't figure out how to finish it. Then I suddenly realised the title was the name of her boat. And with that it was liberated, unlocked and everything came clear!"

"I started writing this one years ago, when I was close to the water, on tour somewhere. I had only a seed idea of it, but it has stayed with me for a while now. On the Lottapianos Tour during the summer of 2003, when we were in San Francisco, I was by the bay again. The song began to come back to me. Once again I began to understand the female character I needed to embody, I was able to finish the piece, but a real turning point was when I was able to see the character's boat, which she called Martha's Foolish Ginger: sailing out of the bay and into the Pacific Ocean."

"I'm a sucker for a good love song. One of my friends had sent me this book called Sextrology, mainly just cause she's into that kind of stuff. Anyway, I was thumbing through it one night, as you do, and I started thinking about how in a relationship you can't stop yourself sometimes from putting your lovers attitude about something down to their sign. I don't necessarily think that the male character I'm singing about is a Pisces, he might have Pisces in his chart somewhere. but more than anything it's about the end of an age - whether that's the end of a relationship of the end of the Piscean age, which has been the last two thousand years. And sometimes a relationship can feel like it's been going on for 2000 years."