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Lyrics:
Out and back to Erie,
I’ve had many roads run over me,
I’ve had many roads run over me.
Out and back, four-hundred years,
I’ve had many oaks felled over me,
I’ve had many oaks felled over me.
The knotweed and the rose,
they sprang up in my home,
they’re choking me.
Out along the corridor,
I’ve had many lines cut into me,
I’ve had many lines cut into me.
Out along the banks,
I’ve had many eyes watch over me,
I’ve had many eyes watch over me.
For this project, I aimed to address the issue of environmental exploitation by settler colonialists. I planned to address the issue by writing a song from the perspective of Plum Creek, a notable environmental feature in the Oberlin area. In this way, I hoped to empathize with the environment and give a voice to its suffering. Hopefully, this voice can reach people in the area and encourage thought and action with respect to their relationship with the natural world.
In the lyrics, I tried to reference environmental damages that the creek has suffered or witnessed: deforestation, invasive planting (references to Japanese Knotweed and Multiflora Rose), overmowing of the riparian corridor (“I’ve had many lines cut into me”), and general human exploitation (Oberlin Public Works Department, 1). I tried to offer a glimmer of hope at the end of the song by including the line about “many eyes watching over” the creek. I wanted to recognize those humans who care about the environment and who are making an effort to protect and sustain it.
My project connects to class in a couple ways: our unit on Native epistemology, and our unit on protest song. It is also connected to class in that my songwriting was inspired by the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, specifically the song “Oldest Tree in the World.” Simpson’s treatment of the natural world in this song successfully communicates the environment’s suffering, and I took a lot of inspiration from her writing in trying to accomplish the same thing for myself.
With regards to Indigenous epistemologies, the chapter we read from Hasek and Lindala is relevant to my project. Their article is centered on “Indigenous environmental cultural values” in popular music. They specifically emphasize the connectedness of Indigenous peoples to the environment and the understanding that Indigenous people have of the “consciousness in all life forms” (Hasek and Lindala, 124). They mostly discuss Indigenous artists and their work in this chapter, but, as a non-Indigenous person, I felt it was important for me to try to understand and embody this point of view in my own songwriting for this project. I especially wanted to accomplish what Hasek and Lindala call giving “voice to those who cannot speak,” and heed their call to “contribute to the collective growing voice on behalf of…the Earth” (Hasek and Lindala, 134). Hasek and Lindala also point to the Indigenous values of gaining knowledge “through the observation of, and living in harmony with, the Earth” as well as the need to treat the Earth with “honor and respect” due to it being the “foundation for all life” (Hasek and Lindala, 124). I hope that, in doing this project, I have contributed in a small way to fostering these values in the non-Indigenous community and, as such, improving their relationship with the environment.
Being a protest song, my project also ties back to the chapter we read from Allan Moore. I was thinking a lot about his concepts of the relationship between persona (lyrical content) and environment (musical characteristics) while working on my project. For Moore, persona “always exists within a musical environment” (Moore, 397) such that the environment modifies “the assumed position of the song’s persona” (Moore, 389). In my writing process, the music and the lyrics came together pretty much simultaneously; because of this, I think Moore would characterize the environment in my song as quiescent, or, “merely setting up the (largely attitudinal, often genre) expectations through which a listener may listen” (Moore, 389). I didn’t intentionally construct the music to analogize the lyrics or contradict them in a particular way, but I hope that setting the words to a relatively accessible musical style contributes to the legibility and power of the lyrics.
Works Cited:
Hasek, Samantha, and April E. Lindala. “‘Hearing the Heartbeat: Environment Cultural Values in the Lyrics of Native Songwriters.’” Indigenous Pop: Native American Music From Jazz to Hip Hop, 2016, 123–35.
Oberlin Public Works Department. “City of Oberlin: Plum Creek Riparian Corridor Restoration Project,” n.d. https://www.cityofoberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/riparian-mailing.pdf.
Moore, Allan. “A Hermeneutics of Protest Music” from The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music. Routledge eBooks. New York: Rutledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203124888.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. The Oldest Tree in the World. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnduY5fm5WI.
