![]() ![]() There I found a listing for a “La Madama” statue. ![]() I remember someone in a spiritual Facebook group recommending the products of a Black-owned Hoodoo shop online. Through uncovering the evidence of a resilient ancestral connection, I began seeing myself more clearly.īut with each step forward I would also find myself jerked another ten steps back. Hoppin’ John and cabbage to ring in the new year, the stories of conjure doctors and trickster spirits told to me as a child that in turn enchanted me and frightened me into behaving. I remember how much began to resonate with me immediately about these old spiritual systems, which are so deeply ingrained in Black culture that many of us miss them hiding in plain sight. Somewhere in my early twenties, I began doing research on folks still practicing African American Indigenous religions here in the States. About all the hits and misses, the spiritual and emotional revelations, and the community I’ve found while navigating my journey home to myself. How I’ve been digging backwards for my roots to better inform the shape in which I’ll grow forward. I wanted to show them the road I took to get here. And I say “remember” because our Indigenous traditions haven’t actually been lost, and that’s more than evidenced by how often they reappear uncredited and whitewashed in the witchy and wellness industries, sold back to us by non-Black folks at slap-your-mama prices. The radical version: I want to make spiritual tools that help us to remember where we come from, and how divinity is inherent to Black people.Īlways was and always will be. The basic version: Inclusivity and representation are nowhere near enough we must be centered in our own spiritual and mindfulness practices. It had to be a 1-minute pitch, but I had several pages of notes and, honestly, I could have given them hours. “My vocation is more in composition really than anything else-building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.Today I gave an elevator pitch to a prominent women’s entrepreneurship program about why my product, a deck of cards that align specifically with the spiritual practices of Black American folks, is something we all need. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn’t really playing music.”Ģ0. “Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. Everyone’s approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it’s all valid.”ġ9. Everyone’s got their own character, and that’s the thing that’s amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. “Let me explain something about guitar playing. There shouldn’t be a wall that you’re going toward and bouncing off.”ġ8. “In the 1960s and into the ’70s, everyone in their own way was trying to open up the musical horizon. Then if you eliminate the halo, you have to go back and put in some artificial reverb, which is never as good.”ġ7. You lose that sort of halo that bleeding creates. Once you start cleaning everything up, you lose it. “The instruments that bleed into each other are what creates the ambiance. “I was really competitive with myself.”ġ6. “We weren’t making money in the Yardbirds.”Ĩ. “Led Zeppelin was a band that would change things around substantially each time it played… We were becoming tighter and tighter, to the point of telepathy.”ħ. That’s how culture, creativity, moves, isn’t it?”Ħ. “That’s exactly why I came into music in the first place: to be inspired by what I hear to make it something else, to make it my own. I read part of Keith Richards’ autobiography, and it was totally parallel with me, learning from American records.”ĥ. “I wanted to emulate music from America-young punks playing rock n’ roll is what it was. You can’t really compare it to how it is today.”Ĥ. “Right from the first time we went to America in 1968, Led Zeppelin was a word-of-mouth thing. “If you listen to our work, from Led Zeppelin I to Coda, it’s just a fantastic textbook.”ģ. It’s not like the music I’m doing is just a single thread.”Ģ. I come up with something I haven’t done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. “If I pick up a guitar, I don’t practice scales. ![]()
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