Olivia Chaney Is My Spirit Animal

tender as life and fragile as a bluebird's egg

Olivia Chaney at the harmonium

There are worlds…and then there are worlds. The world of the Archons is not one in which I prefer to live, but it is the field of our struggle. But there are also the worlds, those disclosed, for example, in poetry, in literature, in music. But there are also worlds disclosed through nature, through liturgy, and through what one might call interpersonal relationality. The world of the Archons is the only one that lacks any kind of significant reality—yet it is the one by which most of us expend our spiritual capital. What a terrible investment. But, as we read in the mythopoetics of Gnosticism, the world of the Archons is a simulacra, an imitation of a world, a fabrication. The real worlds are elsewhere. But, like the heroes of legend or fairy-tales, we stumble upon them all the time.

As readers of The Druid Stares Back are no doubt aware, I have “a thing” about folk music, and particularly about English and Celtic folk music. This probably goes back to when I was eleven or twelve and my mom bought me one of those cheapo K-Tel compilation albums of current hits (always shortened versions) and I heard Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” for the first time. That was it: I needed to get a mandolin. At thirteen I started playing the guitar (self-taught) and when I was sixteen a girl I knew had a mandolin and taught me a few chords. I was smitten (both by the instrument and by the girl). Later that Spring, my girlfriend (not the same girl, but her friend—okay, it was a little complicated) gave me a mandolin for my birthday. My fate was thus sealed.

Ever since then, folk music and that beautiful hybrid, “folk-rock,” have been an ever-replenishing, ever new source of enjoyment, comfort, and inspiration. I’m sure there are worse ways to spend one’s energy.

Anyway, over the Christmas holidays I was improvising on my six-string (it was tuned DADGDD) and thought I’d come up with a nice little chord structure. Unfortunately (for me), it turned out to be a variation on the wonderful Sandy Denny composition she recorded with Fairport Convention, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.”

So, given what Claudine Gay had just gone through, I decided to not finish writing that song and turned it into a version of Sandy’s masterpiece.

And then I got to thinking about female singers. And, as one does, I dropped a list of my favorites on social media and invited others to share theirs. My list included Sandy, Ann Wilson, Kate Bush, Chrissie Hynde, and two others that escape me at the moment. One of my “followers” (such a weird term when you think about it—like we’re all Jesus or something) asked if I had ever heard of Olivia Chaney, and dropped a couple of links. I hadn’t. Usually when this happens, I might listen for thirty seconds or so—making a mental note to return to the track later (which I usually forget to do). Not this time. This time I was stunned by what I heard. The first song was a version of the old hymn “The Old Church Yard” which Chaney released with the Decemberists as the “folk super-group” Offa Rex in 2017:

I bet I listened to it twenty times over the next couple of days. Then I busted out the Broadcaster and learned it. The other song was “Shelter,” which Chaney released in 2018 on her second album, also named Shelter.

Then, as one does, I checked out more of her songs, both on her YouTube channel and on Spotify.

It was then I decided my Regeneration Podcast co-conspirator Mike Sauter and I should try to get Chaney to come on to the show and talk about her music. I followed the usual channels, and I’ll be darned if she didn’t agree to speak with us (the video/podcast still hasn’t posted—but it’s coming).

In preparation, I listened to all of her music—including her guest appearances on the Kronos Quartet’s 2017 album Folk Songs and her charming EP, 2023’s Six French Songs. Her French is beautiful and so are the songs.

In preparation for the conversation, Olivia (notice how I moved from professional to informal there?) sent me a link to the MP3s of her forthcoming album, Circus of Desire, set to be released in March, as well as the lyrics to the songs. Then I did something I don’t think I’ve done since The Waterboys’ This Is the Sea and Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love when they came out in 1985: I undertook an intense study of the entire album. It was kind of a luxury and a return to the Self for me, sitting at my desk with my headphones on, reading the lyrics as she sang them. Then I decided to learn to play a few of them on the guitar. It was an entrance into another world.

The main takeaway for me, as I recorded in my journal after this immersion in her music, was that I discovered a presence as “tender as life and fragile as a bluebird’s egg.” There is something so achingly beautiful, so vulnerable, and, nevertheless, so fierce in her music that I stand in awe of the talent that can body that forth. Her music is so divinely, so tragically, so fiercely human. It is no wonder that her middle name is Clio, the Muse of history, music, and poetry.

This may be the first time I’ve undertaken such an intense study of an album in decades, but intense study is basically what I have been doing as a literary scholar for a long time. There’s a weird thing that happens: you start to feel as if you know the subject of your study. This was particularly the case with me when I undertook intense studies of the Metaphysical poets Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, and John Donne—and it also happened with my beloved Eleanor Farjeon, as well as in my recent intense study of Novalis as I prepared to write an introduction for his Christianity or Europe (should be out from Angelico Press in the second half of February). (I posted about the weird astrological synchronicities I have with Novalis here). And it also seems to have happened with Olivia Chaney.

Now, writing about dead people and feeling as if I “know” them through their work is one thing (though I really do feel as if I know them), but it is quite another with someone living. As they say, “Never meet your heroes.”

But I haven’t been disappointed. I discovered through our brief interactions via email and interview that Olivia is married to an English professor, a medievalist (I’m an early modernist), who shares my disappointment in academia and that she and her husband and their two small children live more or less simply and try to keep their children away from screens as much as possible—and then I learn that they send their eldest to a Waldorf school (as many of you know, I was a Waldorf teacher for sixteen years prior to defecting to academia). In addition, a number of her videos have been filmed at a cottage in Yorkshire—no running water or electricity—and her second single from the new album, “To the Lighthouse,” is about her sister who moved with her family to an island in the Irish Sea in order to raise her children away from the madness of the world—much as my wife and I have done here in the wilds of Michigan. In that song you will find this beautiful profession of love:

I can see the lighthouse
Is where you want to be
Beacon of danger
Ancient mystery
Your children will grow
To be hardier and free
Than we ever were
Or could ever be

So I guess this is a long way of saying how pleased I am at the vicissitudes of life, the randomness of biography, the moments that reveal to us—at least sometimes—that our intuitions might be right after all. As I wrote to Olivia at the end of one of my emails to her, after finding all of these unexpected connections, “I think you may be my spirit animal.”

In closing, I am just thankful to have discovered this important artist (for the last week or two I wake in the morning with one of her songs in my head), because this is why we live. This is the real world, the world of meaning, of moods, of love, of sorrow. And it’s a world worth fighting for.

And, Olivia, if you’re reading this—you and your husband and your children have an open invitation any time you like to stay at Stella Matutina Farm where we live in an old farmhouse (a house on a hill) and have a yurt waiting in the woods—lacking both electricity and running water. It’s not a lighthouse, but it is full of mystery.

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