Tapestry by Dawn Robin

There are so many points of impetus and inspiration for this project, too many to name here. I'm feeling very proud of this as a step forward in piano, vocal, and recording skill, and also as a recorded act of music therapy amidst a transitional period in my life. To produce my versions of these twelve songs, I relied on basic chord sheets (which weren't always accurate), and leaned the rest by ear. Some of my arrangements stay relatively true to Carole's, while others take quite a leap.

It felt almost mystical to learn these songs through listening, like reaching out towards a mirror and brushing the soft, warm fingertip in its reflection. Finding where my hands met Carole's on the keyboard became a ritual act of tracing my lineage as a musician, as a songwriter, as a woman. Can I feel my way through history by sounding out harmonies and chord voicings? Is it possible to blur the line between my own narrative and words I did not write? Was Aretha Franklin looking out on the morning rain as well? Was Carole King doing so when she wrote it? Who do we become when we sing songs from half a century ago?

"Meaning is not in things, but in between them"
-Norman O. Brown-

This quote shows up in one of my favorite films of all time, Velvet Goldmine (dir. Todd Haynes). In this fictionalized history of glam rock, anti-hero Brian Slade becomes so immersed in his stage personal Maxwell Demon that the two become merged, inseparable, both of them real and fictional at once. The whole thing is a fantastical allusion to David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust era and the ways the glam rock genre played openly with fantasy as the very stuff from which reality springs forth.

Likewise, reality and fiction become blurred as two people are mystically connected in Jeanne Thornton's novel 'Summer Fun'. Gala, a lonely trans woman, attempts to mystically summon former Get Happies songwriter B----, and writes her a series of letters that not only blur ficton with reality within the world of the novel, but also allow the reader to peel that narrative from the page and drape it over the very real history of the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson.

It is in this spirit that I approached my work on Tapestry. To me, rock and pop have long been vehicles for bringing dreams to life, for letting fantasy run wild like lipstick smeared decadently across a smiling face. In my wildest Tapestry dreams, I am there at A＆M Records Studio B, candlelit at my piano in a long flowing dress. It is January 1971, and the world is yet unaware of the perfect beauty I am about to reveal. I hope that those who listen to my Tapestry covers will hear this spirit of fantasy, and that as the whirring chorus in the vocals shifts these songs into weird dissonant overdrive that the listener will likewise lose balance and drift with me into this strange dream that exists between reality and fiction, between Carole king's Tapestry and my own. By the end of the album, as the raw mix and mic static on Natural Woman pulls the listener back to stark reality, I hope that a little bit of that fantasy remains intact, and that it becomes impossible to see where the division between real and imaginary ever was.

In this pretext, this album has been a ship in which I've traveled to the far reaches of many of my own dreams, particularly those around womanhood, love, fame, and conviction in myself. It has been my goal to return from this expedition with artifacts of that dreaming which show that it is possible to reach out and touch our own fantasies right where we stand, to sit down at the piano of our lives and play music which is transportive and transformative. May we all hold the power to change into anything we wish to be just by believing it to be so.

Finally, a quote from Dr. Frank N. Furter:

"Don't dream it. Be it."

Love, Dawn