Sunday Thoughts & One Inch Photos

Two Ways You Can Help Artists When Streaming!

Jul 02, 2023

Hi everyone. As you all know, I am releasing a new album very soon! It’s called A Great Wild Mercy.

The title track begins “It was a summer storm that broke the heat, she had a blue umbrella as she stepped into the street, I saw her look up from beneath the brim, thought better of it and closed it up again.” The rain slipped down her face like forgiveness or unexpected grace. It felt like seeing a mercy or the finest kind of prayer. It’s been a hard few years and so much has happened. In this emerging post-pandemic time of remembering, integration and living in process, I am sensing (within myself and others) a great longing to just put down the umbrella. We’re ready to feel the ever present goodness still here and at work in the world and in our hearts.

“I’m tired of all the rage, tired of all the worry, I’m ready for a great wild mercy.”

The full album will be released October 13th, but a few songs will be released as singles beforehand this summer! You’ll be able to hear them as soon as they come out on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream your music, and I can’t wait to share them with you! The title song will be released as a single on streaming services Monday July 24!

How You Can Help Artists By Streaming on Spotify & Apple Music Now!

Though streaming services pay artists much less than buying CDs, they also provide something CDs don’t: a chance for millions of different people to listen and discover your music without having to invest in an entire CD. They also allow music to be quickly and easily shared with other people. In a nutshell - the more people stream a song (listening to it on their phones, tablets or computers), the more other people will hear it. For example, the more people listen to “You Can Do This Hard Thing” on Spotify, the more Spotify’s algorithm will share the song with new people. Therefore, the more you listen to a song or artist, the more new folks encounter it too!

My songs are written to be a welcoming space for everyone. A space where hopefully we can connect and recognize one another, appreciating the human experiences we share. I’d love to invite more people into the welcoming space that music can create.If you’d like to do this with me, please connect with me on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream your music!

Here is a quick video I created explaining 2 ways you can help me, help this new project, and hopefully learn a fun new way to get the new singles and full album as soon as they are released!

The two ways are “Follow” me as an artist, and “presaving” my album. Doing these are easy, fun and very helpful to artists. I hope you’ll check out the video!

Here is my Spotify artist page, so you can follow me on Spotify.
You can pre-save A Great Wild Mercy, my new album, here.

Sunday Thoughts - One Inch Photos

Photos of dew on cabbage and broccoli leaves taken this week on my friend, Marcia’s farm.

Share A Gathering of Spirits

Its been a rough week for news, heat waves and extreme weather, SCOTUS decisions that weaken protections for minorities and our LGBTQ+ kindred, halting a program providing student debt relief. It doesn’t not make sense to me that people espousing to a spiritual tradition based in a philosophy of radical love and welcome, engages in promoting policies and legislation that are blatantly discriminatory at best and plain old hateful at worst. There is an Anne Lamott quote that I think of so often these days, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

In times when so much does not make sense, I often ground myself in the things that do make sense. On a week of tough news, I head out to the garden or into the woods. I take close up photos of things that are growing and beautiful. A drop of dew on a lush green leaf makes sense.

Here is the poem I wrote after time on the farm this week.

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What Makes Sense

I pledge alliance to a drop of dew 
Wobbling on a broccoli leaf,
To the silver pattern on a zucchini frond
A perfect spiral at the center of a cabbage head. 
I bow my head to the licorice smell of fennel filagree,
The taste of rounded peas and knee-high corn
And the perfect dun of barley hay.
I namaste a row of beans, 
To garlic scapes and turnip greens
To the sweetness of sweet potato vines
To the last red radish and first blueberry.
I lift up my face to the summer sky
The sound of larks
And the feel of dirt
To all that keeps making sense
In senseless times. 

-Carrie Newcomer 2023

So today I acknowledge what concerns our hearts and disturbs our sleep, but also what keeps true, the north stars we follow, the things at make sense in senseless times.