I Wandered Ancient Countryside

New song and video about the fairies, their gifts and their curses

I’m happy to present July’s full moon song and video, “I Wandered Ancient Countryside,” featuring many lovely paintings from the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

Since I was a little girl, I have loved Greek mythology and fairy tales from Europe and the British Isles. I read every one of the Green and Red (any color I could find!) Fairy books in my elementary school library. My father gave me a children’s book of Greek mythology when I was eight. There was a beautiful illustration of Aphrodite, a goddess I honored in a song may years later. I spent a lot of time alone in the woods, wondering if I might catch a glimpse of a fairy twinkling amidst the trees. I wrote a full-rhyming poem called “Elves” when I was eight. I couldn’t get enough of fairies, elves, trolls, and magic. My mother read the Narnia books as well as the Hobbit to us, and I re-read them all myself too. As you probably know, these writers also explored mythic and fairy tale themes.

Most of “I Wandered Ancient Countryside” was written over 23 years ago, after a painful heartbreak. I set the song in the mythical past from those stories, sending the heroine to the Land of the Fairies and back. As is usually the case when writing songs, I wrote it to try to come to terms with thoughts and feelings.

In many stories, fairies are beautiful and enchanting tricksters who lure unwary humans to their domain, sometimes for years. When the traveler returns to the “real world,” she is devastated and depleted, often feeling that the fairies have used her and robbed her of precious time. Fairies are lovely, but they don’t really care about us. This happens with love sometimes when it is shimmering and beautiful, but not grounded in everyday reality. How to see the full-spectrum truth of such a situation? Is it an unmitigated delusion, or is the beauty and ecstasy we experience still real on some level or another? Like so much about life, it’s complicated and layered. I’ve explored this theme in other mythic songs such as Persephone and Aphrodite, and also in Walking to San Francisco.

Although I worked on the song extensively, I didn’t finish it at the time—I couldn’t find a way to the positive ending I wished for because I was still very much in a dark place. Anything I came up with felt like a forced redemption. After returning from the land of the fairy folk, healing can take some time.

I came across my scrawled lyrics in a folder a few months back and was finally ready to finish “I Wandered Ancient Countryside,” which I had never performed, but also never forgotten. I had long since moved on from that heartache and could see the process more clearly. Sometimes when we are compelled by magic, we must follow the fairy lights. Even though there are consequences, our life is richer in the long run.

I am not the first artist to explore ancient stories and myths in a new way, nor will I be the last. In working on the video this song, I realized I wanted to find paintings that depicted the lyrics. I examined hundreds of paintings on Wikimedia Commons. I ended up using over 20 artists and 57 paintings to complete the video for this song.

I found many of these paintings exploring classical themes from a loose group of British painters from the mid to late 19th century known as the Pre-Raphaelites. As my song is the story of a woman going to the Land of Fairies, I found a rich reservoir of images that worked beautifully with my lyrics. I also drew on other painters to accompany the lyrics, but many are from this group.

A Vision of Fiammetta by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (model is Marie Spartali Stillman))

You’ll see several bared breasts (often just one peeking out of a gauzy chemise) in these paintings, and red-haired beauties abound. I have always had some unease about the male gaze reflected in so many of the naked ladies in Western art. The female body is beautiful—but sometimes I do not relate to the ways male artists and writers see women. I’ve always wondered who the models were—what was their experience of the artistic process? And at times I wonder, who are these fragile and vacant creatures I see staring back at me from the canvas? Not familiar to me in my view of women. Obviously, I don’t need to relate to everything in the art world or the world in general. I still found so many paintings I loved by men depicting women, especially the work of John William Waterhouse.

Windswept by John William Waterhouse

I was delighted to discover two female artists in this group whose work I especially resonated with. One of them, Marie Spartali Stillman, was also a model for several other artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, perhaps the most famous of these Pre-Raphaelite artists. (See Rossetti’s painting earlier in this post, “A Vision of Fiammetta.”)

Convent Lily by Marie Spartali Stillman

Evelyn de Morgan was another of my favorites. It’s remarkable how hard it is to find paintings of women from the 19th century conveying moods of true ecstasy, joy or power. I found them with de Morgan, who was (not coincidentally!) a woman herself.

Evelyn de Morgan S.O.O

Once again, I was joined by Jon Green on bass and Peter Pendras on guitar for this production. I am so grateful for their gorgeous and sensitive contributions. Thanks to my husband and engineer extraordinaire Brian Castillo for engineering and mastering and co-producing with me.

Thank you so much for reading, listening, and watching. May you enjoy your trip to the Land of the Fairies and back! I would love to hear your response in the comments, or you can also just respond to this email if you prefer to send a note to me.