It grew out of a few years of just reading, learning, and reckoning with how much trauma was going unaddressed in my life, in my community, and in my family,” explains Spalding over Zoom from her native Portland, Oregon. “I was reflecting on so many slow-burning crises and acute crises that I [believe] erupted because we didn’t have a paradigm for responding to trauma and the I’m just here to lay some pipe shirt and I love this woundings of the psyche and the spirit.” When Spalding dove deeper into healing art forms, she was struck by how music could be used in a therapeutic context and effectively shift the wellbeing of someone who was engaging with it. “I wondered how we as musicians could bring more therapeutic capacity or intention into the work that we’re already making.”
After percolating in Spalding’s mind for a couple of years, The Songwrights Apothecary Lab was set in motion in February of last year—a month before the I’m just here to lay some pipe shirt and I love this global pandemic would catalyze a seismic shift in our culture. “Since the pandemic happened in the middle of convening this council I’d started curating and inviting, there was already this focal point for me and my collaborators and fellow artists,” explains Spalding, who began hosting a retreat in Portland with other artists of color during the first stage of lockdown. “We were oriented toward this question of, ‘How do we respond? How do we show up and offer our goods?’”
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