Mother Juniper - Write The Soil Lighter (2023)

“These Little Animals” first came from a poem. I feel most lyrics and poems I write don’t actually come from me, that they’re a channeling of sorts. I especially feel that way about this song. At the time I was working on a short documentary about a death educator in Brooklyn, learning more about natural burials, death cafes, and the history of funerals and the death industry. I had death on the brain a lot.

“Bring my body to the doves” was a way of singing, “please don’t put me in a grave,” a way of exploring the body’s release after death as well as the natural cycle of life and death. Looking back at these lyrics, I feel they resonate with the Bardo state. The Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism consists of many phases. It’s the in-between state after someone has died but has yet to be reborn or reincarnated. In the Bardo you hallucinate images and experiences from your past life. You are challenged and faced with your karmic inheritance and relive your most recent life in distortion. I believe These Little Animals came from picturing what a Bardo state would feel like as well as an exploration of the Bardo states we experience while living. It examines the dissociations that can be felt in unfamiliar, between spaces. There’s a sense of darkness These Little Animals conjures up which sprang from me trying to navigate the anxiety of a liminal space while recalling flashing images from my past.”

The body of work that this single is leading to, Write the Soil Lighter, is Mother Juniper’s first full length album, created over the span of three years.