Erika Lundahl "Lady Be"

Written by Erika Lundahl

Photos by Max Shaw Photography

"LADY BE"

By Erika Lundahl

www.erikalundahl.com

www.patreon.com/erikalundahl

Video recorded & mixed by Doug Indrick at Rolling Crone Records

Edited by Erika Lundahl

Recorded at Hatch Workshop

Stockton, CA

Erika on the inspiration behind "Lady Be"

This song is a call to solitude--and especially to feminine solitude.

I wrote it when I was 20, trying to find grounding after feeling my internal world fractured by an inability to say a simple word: No. No. No.

I need to be by myself.

Go away.

I need to learn to be whole. By myself.

No.

No was a word that I learned late in life. It came out hard and laboring. It was a talisman that I searched for and ran from. It terrified me. It was especially difficult to say to men. Men asked for parts of me and I knew—but didn’t know well enough—that I couldn’t give to them.

This song is also for the complicated female friendships that form and dissolve on the road to No, where kinship is grounded in shared attempts at subversion of unwanted desire. Camaraderie built from the misadventures and the pains we bring unto ourselves and to each other in our stumbling to know the sacred boundaries of our bodies and of our inner life, and the lines we cannot allow others to cross within us.

Lastly, the song was inspired by a poem by Emily Dickenson, which rang with such truth at the time I read it that it lives on my heart forever more:

Much Madness is Divinest Sense

Much Madness is divinest Sense-

To a discerning Eye-

Much Sense-the starkest Madness-

‘Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail-