'The Rhizome Project' album + book

RELEASE: Friday, Sept. 6, 2024

FOLK SONGS + STRING QUARTET

An album, a collection, a bundle, a root system, a packet of seeds, a rhizome…

Making a music album — maybe especially in an era when most of us listen to singles, playlists and fragments — can invite a listener into a collection of ideas or feelings that make more sense when gathered together. Curating an album of folk songs that ‘formed me’ helps me make sense of the new sounds I create today. Gathering these songs, these stories and these pictures helps me know why certain songs (and people) keep nurturing and challenging me across decades — allowing me to remain a ‘resonant reed’.

I feel very lucky to have grown up with a sense of songs as shared treasures, like stones, shells, leaves and other tiny things gathered on a walk to share later with others. In the album's accompanying book (The Rhizome Song Stories) are highly subjective, personal stories of one musician’s way of making sense of the world. This book accompanies The Rhizome Project album, but I also believe it can travel solo.

Several of the songs in The Rhizome Project were the first songs to allow me the confidence to sing alone, while others outlined elemental ethics that my little voice could grow into. I remember realizing sometime around age 10 that I belonged to generations of little voices raised bravely and plainly - close to the natural world, and singing in spite of our insignificance. Therefore, songs raising a hand of protest also reminded me to catch wonder and awe in the other hand.

I am a worker bee for music, an introvert and dreamer who travels to make my living. One of the lessons of being in my forties is how deeply shaped I am by the landscape and people I come home to. I look to certain neighbors and friends to remind me of the myriad creative and practical ways to be human - right here, right now, in all the mess, the ordinary, painful and precious.

The Rhizome Project celebrates all the powerful ways we are connected, though, like the rhizome roots, those connections may be hidden or forgotten.

“If this recording were a wine, I might describe it as having notes of old forest and island sand with a deep body of hiraeth, legs that extend through the glass and entangle themselves in the bookshelves of your childhood.” - Debora Ewing, Folkworks

The Rhizome Project

Moira Smiley

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An album, a collection, a bundle, a root system, a packet of seeds, a rhizome… Making a music album — maybe especially in an era when most of us listen to singles, playlists and fragments — can invite a listener into a Read more
An album, a collection, a bundle, a root system, a packet of seeds, a rhizome…

Making a music album — maybe especially in an era when most of us listen to singles, playlists and fragments — can invite a listener into a collection of ideas or feelings that make more sense when gathered together. Curating an album of folk songs that ‘formed me’ helps me make sense of the new sounds I create today. Gathering these songs, these stories and these pictures helps me know why certain songs (and people) keep nurturing and challenging me across decades — allowing me to remain a ‘resonant reed’.

I feel very lucky to have grown up with a sense of songs as shared treasures, like stones, shells, leaves and other tiny things gathered on a walk to share later with others.

Several of the songs in The Rhizome Project were the first songs to allow me the confidence to sing alone, while others here outlined elemental ethics that my little voice could grow into. I remember realizing sometime around age 10 that I belonged to generations of little voices raised bravely and plainly - close to the natural world, and singing in spite of our insignificance. Therefore, songs raising a hand of protest also reminded me to catch wonder and awe in the other hand.
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  1. 1
    Go Dig My Grave 3:52
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  2. 2
    Mourning Dove 4:58
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  3. 3
    My Son David 5:17
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  4. 4
    Now Is The Cool Of The Day 5:15
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  5. 5
    Ar Lan Y Môr 2:25
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  6. 6
    Standing On The Shore 3:47
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  7. 7
    Soul Cake 2:41
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  8. 8
    Oh, Watch The Stars 5:00
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  9. 9
    Awake Awake 4:11
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  10. 10
    John O Dreams 5:07
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  11. 11
    Great Trees 2:50
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The Rhizome Song stories book

Currently based in Vermont, my childhood home state, I decided to create a book (The Rhizome Song Stories) featuring portraits and stories of Vermonters who live close to me, and whose personal stories resonate with one of the eleven songs collected into The Rhizome Project album. Storytelling portraits also seemed to be a natural evolution in my ongoing audio-visual collaboration with artist, Fiona Small, so, here in these pages, I look out beyond my immediate family to the characters around me who keep surprising me with their perspectives and relationships with this place that I often forget to see anew.

I’m drawn to the newcomers who are passionately here in discovery. I’m drawn to my mother’s generation of idealistic kids of the 70s who found home here for their ideals. I’m drawn to those from families who have been in relationship with this particular ground for generations. These songs and these neighbors contain small, sustainable cures for the everyday pummeling of bad human news. Thank you for exploring this rhizome of songs and stories with me.