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-