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Since the first song of an album often sets the theme, I asked Caroline if Walter Anderson is a major influence to her, above and beyond Tales of the Islander, to which she replied:
"He is an influence, especially in regards to this album. I meant for there to be a constant theme of nature as sacred, nature as illuminating... I based the Walter Anderson song on his cottage murals, which are four: sunrise, day, sunset and night. So those (other album) songs are companions."
Certainly this is evident in other songs, such as Abuelita, a languid song with a hauntingly beautiful melody, which is also a Spanish term of endearment for grandmother:
Abuelita underneath the trees
Of Costa Rica and her dark shored seas
They won't tell me about you
They don't want me to see
Abuelita you're just like me (refrain)
The song invokes, in the first stanza, the virgin of the moon, who could be Diana or Artemis the Huntress from Roman and Greek mythology, or the Virgin Mary of Catholics, before segueing into a reverence for Abuelita, grandmother, which, whether Caroline is doing this consciously or not, can't help but associate the song a bit more with mythology, with, to be exact, the archetype of the Crone. Crone today often means hag in our youth-obsessed culture, but in the distant past it meant Wise Woman, the elder woman of great experience who passed her knowledge down to young girls and women. The Crone is also the third aspect of the ancient European Triple-Goddess, whose triad is Virgin, Matron and Crone, new moon, full moon, old moon.
Her choice of inclusion of W.B. Yeats' famous poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, in this album continues this connection between her music, Nature and mythology, because Yeats's poem is a great opus invoking the mystical/magical powers of Nature, as you can note below:
The
Song of Wandering Aengus
William Butler Yeats (1899)
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lads and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
The hazel tree in Celtic tradition is a tree of wisdom, and all knowledge of the arts and sciences resides in what are known as the Nine Hazelnuts of Poetic Art and Inspiration. The silver trout in Celtic lore is a sacred fish, associated, like the salmon, with wisdom and the Otherworld. Apples, of course, are prime symbols of the Divine Feminine, and occur prominently in both Celtic and Greek myth. Note that Caroline's fourth album was entitled The Silver Apples of the Moon, and now this, her fifth, embraces the golden apples from Yeats' poem. This is a perfect numerical synchronicity, since, when you cut an apple in half horizontally, a five-pointed, seed-filled star or Pentagram, ancient Goddess symbol, always appears.
