♡ Well Held ♡ is an invitation to remember how Beloved we are. Grooves to practice how to rest and move inside this grounded, playful devotion. Caught as gifts during my past decade of soul-cocoon learning ~ these Songs want to be wiggling prayer-pop earworms for our collective liberation in collaboration with Earth. I pray that they nourish your imminent unfurling with faith, pleasure, and grace in the process.

I would love to hear back how they work with you & through you Xx

With deepest gratitude to the Giver of Life & Song

✨ @ LAND
These songs were most all caught here, place I love to call the Heartland, place often referred to as the American Midwest, place named by settlers “Illinois” after the Illiniwek tribe. Before these lands were stolen they were the traditional territory of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, and Chickasaw Nations. I give thanks to these peoples who knew how to live in right relationship with Land, and I pray these songs nourish us back into such aligned consciousness.

✨ @ DRUM
Throughout the album you hear my drum friend, a Remo-made 16” synthetic replica of the Buffalo Drum. The original form would have been hide stretched over handmade wooden frame, sounding deep and rich as Mama Earth’s heartbeat, and played widely by original inhabitants of this continent as an integral part of spiritual and social life. I bow to this Knowing that comes toward me in this time and way, and how it is changing me and my prayers. I bow to the people and places that grew this technology. With humility and holding the complexity, I pick up this drum as a descendent of European colonizers and ask that these prayers move through me in a good way that contributes to the mending of the web of life and to the profound reparations yet needed.

5% album proceeds will move toward Chubby Cree, a 12-yr-old indigenous drummer who plays the same drum and whose powerful prayers you can also
hear: www.instagram.com/chubbycree/
and
support here: gofund.me/b85795ab


✨ @ LINEAGE
THank you i love you to my mama, church pianist, whose nightly ritual of playing her heartsong to G*d planted sacred seeds of Song as sanctuary, and freedom in Devotion.

Thank you to all who are dreaming, leading, daring joyful noise and otherwise bringing it in the community singing movement, and especially to my original teachers Liz Rog and Lisa G Littlebird, for opening this life-giving way of being for me.

I am deeply influenced by Black music, soul, Spirit, beats, gospel, & on —- you hear imprints of this in the music I bring through. I give praise and thanks to this legacy. As a white-bodied person, I commit to be in the lifelong work of dismantling white supremacy inside of me and the systems we live in.

5% of album proceeds will move toward Holistic Resistance, my teachers in the way Song & Grief dance, and in “staying creative while taking on the Impossible” - Aaron Johnson
To learn about and support their work directly: www.holisticresistance.com