Carlisle Evans Peck has a mystical and musical new album coming out called The Lines in My Hands. You can get a sneak peek on December 4, at the album release at the Cedar Cultural Center.
Please tell us about yourself and your music.
I am a composer, singer-songwriter, pianist (and I guess I’d say multi-instrumentalist too), and I’ve lived in Minnesota for ten years. My songs weave together themes of queerness, ancestors, and relationship with place and ecology. My work is theatrical, ethereal, immersive, inspired by glam rock and musicals, folk song and choral polyphony, cabaret singers and birdsong. I feel songs are a fundamental mode of storytelling, and I believe the role of the storyteller-in-song is a sacred and ancient role. My ancestors in northwest Europe called those people “bards”, the singers who held and sang the myths, and that’s something I am inspired by and aspire to. I have a cat and a dog, Penelope and Freya, who are perfect and feature prominently in the album art of this record.
The Lines in My Hands comes out on December 4. The music is full bodied like a musical. There’s a magic movement to the sound and listening to the album feels like watching a play. Do you feel like there’s a story in the arc of the songs?
Yes there is a story in the arc of these songs. I feel like the story is not an explicit and chronological story – but there is a throughline in it all. It’s more of a spiral than a line – a series of miniature story arcs within a larger arc. You know how in mythology the protagonist of a tale will have a series of trials or mystical encounters with monsters and beings and magic that all have symbolic significance and make up the larger myth? In “The Lines in My Hands” there are characters, I believe, who are all manifestations of the eternal mystery (life and death). There is the unnamed, supernatural “Her” in both “Danse Macabre” and “The Lines in My Hands”, there is the “beast” that I hunt and hunts me in “My Beast”, the terrified small being that refuses to be forgotten in “Scared Child”, the unnamed lover that is the addressed in “Lover, I’m An Anthem”, whoever I’m getting a light from, babe, in “Trying to Make Sense”, the predator outside the door in “Future Histories”. The album as a whole begins with an ambiguous birth and/or death in the song “Blue”, with the phrase “time’s a blind dog’s howl at night and life a stumbling back to sight” and the album ends with “trying to make sense of it all”. It ends like it begins, settling on the acceptance that living is just knowing what vanishingly small fraction of reality you can in the blink of an eye. And so the cycling begins anew.
Death is a main character in the music but always wearing a different mask. What did you learn about death or your relationship with death in making the album?
I learned that I am terrified of it and mystified by it – like an alien encounter, it feels like it transcends descriptions like good and bad. The last three of my grandparents to die passed within the decade before I wrote these songs, and I have seen the aging of my parents, and felt the turning of time for myself as well. You start to see the impact of mortality around you as you get older, and you must heed it because it is a series of lessons for what is to greet you one day. I guess what I learned is that death is everywhere, death is always, death is inevitable, so how can it not be an inseparable companion to life, two faces of the same cosmic coin? The one cannot exist without the other, and the fear of death is also not to be avoided. I guess this is maybe the greatest lesson I’m trying to learn right now – to engage actively with the sources of your greatest fears and to let grief in no matter the pain. Fear and grief are not the only ways to engage with mortality – yet if you run from or try to ignore the excruciating discomfort of fear and grief they become monsters and they will devour all they encounter. So – let them in and have tea with them, or dance with them, maybe they’ll bring joyfulness and ecstasy with them.
Danse Macabre is a beautiful song full of introspection. Can you tell me about the inspiration?
A Danse Macabre is an artistic motif in which death summons the living to dance along the borderline between living and dying. The feeling of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” was really in my mind writing this song – how do you make a dance that feels joyfully terrifying, unsettlingly jaunty. I really wanted this song to feel beautiful, lilting and dance-like, but with some slightly unsettling quality to it. My vision is that it is like a jolly bacchanal, some sort of an otherworldly waltz that is like a continuously unspooling thread, like the dancers of the tarantella dancing until they drop and perish.
Please tell us about the upcoming album release.
The album release show will be on Thursday, December 4, the day before the album releases digitally. I’m elated to be presenting the full album live with an 8 person band at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis – one of my favorite and most meaningful venues in the Twin Cities. They do SO much to support local music, including my own. The band is made up of many players who recorded the album with me, and who are truly some of the most incredible musicians in the Twin Cities – Willow Waters, Peter Morrow, Lars Johnson, Kasi Misseldine, Anna Dolde, Aubrey Weger, and Mikey Marget. AND, to kick it all off, there are two phenomenal opening sets by local performers Proper-T and McKain Lakey. The album will be released digitally, on all streaming platforms except Spotify and Amazon, and I’m making vinyl for the first time! The records won’t be ready until later in the winter, but we’ve got some radical, exclusive pre-order merch available at the show 🙂
Mostly Minnesota 