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Purple Shadows

from Watershed by ben kamen

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about

I wrote this song during a School of Song workshop with Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes. One of the slides in his first lecture said “certainty is necessary, but always temporary.” I’ve always struggled with the idea that a song I’m writing needs to continue to feel honest indefinitely into the future. I found something liberating in that quote, something about acknowledging the ephemerality of our emotions without devaluing them.
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When I’m writing a song I never sit down with a topic in mind. Lyrics start for me through a non-judgmental stream of consciousness while I’m searching for a melody to grab onto. If I tried to sit down and write a song about my dad’s illness, or the onset of dementia, or family photographs, I assure you the song would be terrible. But coming to it through improvisation and discovery, I might have been the last person to realize what the song was about.
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I had been working with my dad on organizing a very disorganized collection of digitized family photos from the 1930s and 40s. The images were of people I didn’t really know, but I knew their names and learned to recognize their faces in the photographs. One image in particular, of two of my dad’s aunts smiling in front of a statue during WWII, captured my fascination.
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My dad was 20-some years into living with Parkinson’s when he died, and in the last year he was having more frequent falls and trips to the emergency room. This time he returned with a bruised eye and stitches.
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The song captures a moment for me, something that I wrote ‘before’ and now am grappling with ‘after.’

lyrics

close your eyes so i can see the scars that purple shadows hide from view.
unfold your hands so i can trace the lines, so i can trace the lines that guide you.
days repeating in the dark, it's keeping me awake. i’m ready to go.

through your eyes i go back in time.
yellow, black, and white statues smiling.

now my heart is beating, but my hands are cold, are my lungs constricting?
the days will repeat into the dark, still keeping me
awake but i’m ready to go

close your eyes so i can see the scars that purple shadows hide from view.

credits

from Watershed, released July 15, 2022
bk - voice, keyboard, sax, electric guitar, drum programming & drums, bass.

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ben kamen Olympia, Washington

Over the past two decades, Ben Kamen has created music for a variety of formats and genres — from chamber music to multi- channel sound installations to folk and post-rock. Originally from Ohio, Kamen has lived in Olympia since 2006, where he teaches electronic music composition at The Evergreen State College and develops musical instrument apps, including the drum machine “Patterning.” ... more

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