Alchemy is a Process

Water Has Memory

There is alchemy in the writing.

There is alchemy in the recording.

There is alchemy in the mixing and production.

There is alchemy in the sharing.

This could not be more true for both versions of Coming Home. Or for the two versions of Water Has Memory.

Photo by Marlon James

I live in the tropics but my body still recognizes the much slower pace that winter asks of us, perhaps exacerbated by the postpartum depression I’m feeling now that my second album is fully birthed. I’ve been extremely delicate and tenderhearted. The new moon is dark, nights are long and I’ve been spending time with my shadows (having tea with Mara, if you will).

A recurring lesson of last year that I’ve been thinking about is my discovery that there is alchemy at different stages of the creation process. The more that I’ve worked as a producer for myself and others, the more I’ve realized this to be true for me.

I often describe songs coming to me in one of two ways: as a knock on the door of my mind (through my crown chakra) or through a visceral emotion in my body (through my root/heart). Writing a song, often with my notebook, pen and guitar while sitting under a tree, is a transmutation of something into something else and, most times, that’s all there is to it. A song of the moment that’s jotted down in my song book that I go back to every once in a while like an old journal entry.

Other songs want to go the next step. They really want to be recorded and heard by others, and it’s been interesting to notice the difference between those songs and the ones that end up in the pages of the past. They come to me and tell me that they want to be recorded immediately. And funnily enough, they can be quite demanding.

Folks have asked me, “How does that actually work?” Well, based on my own experience (which was delightfully affirmed by the writing of Elizabeth Gilbert in her book, “Big Magic”), songs can be like little spirit people that search for willing artists to embody them into this world. And the more I songwrite, the more I become attuned to their needs based on both my intuition and how my body feels: is this a song of the moment? Do I need to explore this theme beyond just this moment? Is this to be heard outside the confines of this tree I’m sitting under? Depending on the answers to these questions, I take the song to my studio for recording.

Retiro Park, Madrid

In the recording process, I sing the vocals over and over to get a good take, and also to create the layers of harmonized voices that have become part of my signature sound. That repetition becomes a meditation on the lyrics while I’m in the recording booth. I get to process the circumstances around why I wrote the song in the first place or what the song is trying to teach me. I get to soak in the affirmations.

All of this changes my body chemistry. If songwriting is acknowledging and assessing the wound, then recording is like dressing it—adding salve, changing the bandages, letting the wound breathe.

Parallel to that is the arranging, the mixing, the tinkering. It wasn’t until I served as the producer for another artist on songs that I didn’t write that I realized that, during the production process, I intuitively go to the source of the song beyond the lyrics to bring out the essence of the song. I have a dialogue with the song about what it wants to be, and this is much easier to do when I’ve been at least been in the room when the song was written.

Which brings me to why I tend to have two versions of some of my songs. The simple answer is that sometimes, I’m not quite done with it. Or really, the song isn’t quite done with me.

In the case of Water Has Memory, it was both.

The original version of Water Has Memory was released in April 2022, exactly a month after I wrote it. It’s the kind of song that came wholesale and told me immediately that it was both for me and for others.

I was visiting an Arabic bathhouse in Granada, Spain, and I was taken in by the soft lights, the exquisite mosaics on the archways and the incredibly warm water contrasted to the biting cold outside. Somehow, despite my gorgeous surroundings, being in the water that evening brought up a traumatic memory from nearly a decade earlier. I remember taking deep breaths, sinking deeper into the water, and thinking, “Dang, my body remembers. Water has memory.”

That version of the song is actually very mournful to me. It’s a meditation on how fear stays in the body and can be triggered even when in an objectively safe situation. I rarely release my own songs immediately after the production is complete but this one was incredibly demanding and I didn’t argue. But, that’s probably the reason why I wasn’t done with it.

I genuinely don't remember why, but a few weeks after publicly releasing this song, I returned to the mix and I wrote lyrics more akin to journal writing. It’s about my resistance to remembering and the ultimate value of remembering in order to find healing on the other side:

“Some day, I’d like to fly free and remember those days”

Creating this song was my first time working with online guitar loops. There are musicians out there who sort of look down on samples and loops and, yeah, working with live instruments is always ideal. But, we’re not always in an ideal situation and I think the beauty of technology is that we can use it to create something that feels authentic. At the time, I was unable to play guitar due to an injury and, you know what? Loops became a saving grace that year.

The months surrounding the birth of Water Has Memory were the toughest and most painful in my life, and the process of writing today’s newsletter and making meaning from those circumstances has been deeply healing. There’s been alchemy in both writing this letter and sharing the song’s context. In fact, it has cleared the way to finally take a closer look at the other songs written that year. My next music project has begun.

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Sprinkles from the River:

🍃resources mentioned in this letter:

• Mara Broch, Inviting Mara to Tea (article)

• Elizabeth Gilbert, Your Elusive Creative Genius (TED Talk)

• Chetna Mehta, Tea with Mara (visual art)

• Feroza Cayetano, Water Has Memory (original)

🍃in case you missed it, here’s the link to the previous newsletter about my song Human, pt ii, which releases in 2 weeks

Being Human

🍃for Spotify users, here’s the link to pre-save Human, pt ii (this really helps the powers of the algorithm to share my music)

And if you’ve made it this far, I thank you for your sacred attention.

~Feroza