i wear boots all summer long: music + the muse

i made this silly sketch last night.

stevie nicks has been on the brain, forever in my brain, though i can't recall the last time i actually listened to her music. in the last week or so i've also felt the need to find an old composition notebook i used to carry with me when i was 14/15. i used to write a lot of my own words but lyrics as well. her words might have filled more of that notebook than mine.

stevie nicks has been a part of me since my earliest memories, her music a bond shared by the women in my family. my mother, aunts, and grandmother embody their own vagabond/gypsy spirits and i can't think of a time when i was growing up that stevie nicks or fleetwood mac music wasn't playing.


with nightbird lyrics entering my head i sketched a few other girls in boots and felt an urge to paint something based upon my favorite line in that song...

my make-up dark and it's careless.
same circles around my eyes.
(she supposedly says "eye" but i always say "my")

before i started painting, i wasted a little bit of time online which led me to creative allies. i am familiar, having recently entered my first design contest for an ani difranco poster (my connection to her music is another chapter, entirely) but what seemed like more than coincidence and caught my attention was this: a design contest for a fleetwood mac tribute poster!!!

there's something about early fleetwood mac, when lindsay and stevie joined the group, that is a part of me in a different way than the stevie that resonates with and reminds me of the women in my family. something that is my own, the summer of 1994, toting around a copy of "rumors" or "tusk" on cassette and letting whichever friend of mine that was driving know that we'd have to listen to my tape at some point to break up the monotony of metallica, danzig, and snoop dogg (hee hee).

i want to enter the contest but the ideas aren't freely flowing. i wouldn't even know where to begin interpreting and making sense of the lyrics + music felt so deeply in my bones before i'd even had my first tragic relationship.
a box of records i'd inherited was sold at a yard sale when i was still in high school but i've got a copy of rumors on vinyl. words cannot express how much i love the cover. it brings back memories of going through people's record collections when i was little, as if they were photo albums or art collections, poring over the images and the graphics, carefully pulling the records out to see if the lyrics were on the sleeves. i also remember just staring at that picture of stevie and mick, falling in love with something, when i was about four years old.

this morning, i revelled in the symbolism (irony?) of having this one and only album in my home, hung up in one of the cozy corners of my bedroom. the muse is all around even if it eludes me at the moment...

i finally did get to painting last night but it's turned to complete shit. i'm unhappy with it so i walked away and thought i'd post this blog before i forget or get into such a bad mood that i post something else so that it would appear all i ever do is complain here (because mostly i do). i'll get back to it. perhaps start over entirely...for now, i am preparing a series of girls in boots for the upcoming folk art festival and i should go find that composition notebook and flip through it.

the muse is calling...