Today we release the last single from our upcoming Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter album, the title track, “Forever, I’ve Been Being Born”, before the album is officially released on Nov 28 th. Here are some words about the song below. It is available everywhere digital -wise today and features Marissa Nadler.
It was she, my mother, that once said to me “record me your heart.”
https://jessesykesandthesweethereafter.bandcamp.com/track/forever-i-ve-been-being-born ….so I did.
This song is a celebration of life and of existence as seen from above, from a great distance —perhaps the moment when one pulls the lens so far back that they look both into and out from the cosmos.
It is a celebration of the moment of death and the journey and mystery that unfolds for both the living and dying at that precise moment that death comes.
I can feel the song unfolding into a dance of sorts, or a call and response that symbolizes a revelatory cosmic reunion after the hard work of the dying is done.
Phil’s guitar ebbs and flows much the way the breath does at the end, while Marissa literally sings you home. I wrote (many songs on this album) after our beloved old dog Ruby had died in my arms at home, and I said in that moment she died that it was like she and I were riding a toboggan together across the universe, but I stopped and she kept going.
I want to feel that with my mother as I sit by her bedside writing this song’s release announcement, awaiting her departure towards her next journey.
That swooping moment of transcendence.
These were her last clear and consice words to me spoken in a lucid moment before we left the hospital to go into hospice. She said, “I want you all to myself, forever.”
She has me forever and had me before, forever.
This song like all my songs is for her. Because she “got it “ in all its somber glory.
I hope you the listener who finds this song, will hear within it, that sense of a journey, as it might be for you or a loved one when the final rip chord is pulled and you both fall into the gentle calm that follows.
I hope you feel love and the lapse of time, if you are able to truly get inside of it.
I just hope you feel something.
As I always say, “listen in the dark”
-Jesse Sykes