“Hands do it all: they are cleaners, door openers, sweepers, steering wheel turners, mixers, lifters, keyboard clatterers, benders, pullers, strummers, breakers, and identity makers. 

After I began to feel the pain sharply dive down my forearms, encircling the wrists, vibrating along the palm and slinking around my splayed fingers, I knew that I must stop weaving. I had been working for days without much rest, hunched and outstretched. I thought perhaps it would be a week of rest. Weeks turned into months and months turned into a year and some. Soft tissues scarred and shortened from overuse. Without hands, I needed to evolve disciplines and focus on what I could use: my voice. Working with Cmntx Records and collaborator Evan O. Adams, Hold My Threads has emerged, a collection of songs about healing, highways, dinosaurs, moping, the kickstart of a restart, and the ever-evolving way we see ourselves. An ode to our sensitivities, perseverance through pain, and to the surmounting anxiety over barreling fascism and the disregard of climate change.

I wept on my weft. 

Hold My Threads begins with “In the Thick of it”. Creeping along, the song teeters in that limbo space of the healing, fearful of falling into the darkness. There is a psychological practice for people with ailments where you create a visual reference for your pain, and envision it escaping your body. I began to visualize streams of red flying out from my fingertips, seeing the pain leave me. “Zooming” is framed as a coping mechanism for climate anxiety, zooming in on your life and loves, and zooming all the way out to become a speck in the 4.5 billion years of earth’s existence. We are no better than the dinosaurs I decree! And their demise wasn’t even their fault! “Carved” echoes this sorrow over our bleeding earth.

In searching for strength in another, I wrote “Ode to Joan”, my first attempt at using my injury to make me feel powerful. A complex mythologized figure, I hone in on her as my muse of willpower. It was very special to include “Amelia” on the album, as it is a cover of a song by Nora York and her collaborator Jamie Lawrence, written when they were thinking of writing a musical about Amelia Earhart. Nora, my philosopher diva aunt, who I have been in awe of since I can remember looking upon a stage, passed away from pancreatic cancer when I was 18. With the accompaniment of my father’s bassooning, I pay homage to their collaborative relationship as brother and sister, and share my rendition of this beloved piece.” 

–Lena Ruth

tracklist

1. In the Thick of It

2. Begin Again

3. Carved

4. Zooming

5. Pressure

6. Amelia

7. 21

8. Ode to Joan