Wendy K. Laidlaw

And then soul is the heart and the deep body and the ways of connecting.

And song is something that actually does both.

Song pulls spirit down, but it brings the soul up.

Yeah, so I use chants, you know, a lot.

For myself, too.

Surely.

Yeah.

I'm pretty comfortable with that.

Less comfortable with my eyes, but yeah.

I'll stop doing this as soon as we start recording.

Yeah, I was very imaginative as a child.

I would get images and even dreams, and they seemed to be just problematic for my parents and for the adults in general, so I stopped talking about those things.

But it continued to happen.

And then one story I tell is how I'm growing up in a poor neighborhood in New York City, in an Irish neighborhood, actually.

And so one of the things I learned as a child was not to ask for what I wanted.

Because first of all, I wasn't going to get it.

And second of all, like the whole family was depressed for two weeks when I asked for it and no one could provide it.

And so the problem with that usually is then you repress your own desires.

And so it comes to my 13th birthday.

13 was a big year for me.