Posts Tagged ‘The Foundling’
Renmin Park, volume 1 – Little Dark Heart
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
When we adopted my youngest daughter, when she was placed in our arms for the very first time, she stared at us in complete silence for about 30 seconds and then huge tears, enormous sorrow, welled from deep inside her. It was from that specific moment that the phrase little dark heart sprung. I held on to it for six years because I didn’t understand how it applied, how can a one-year-old child have a dark heart? It was after our visits to the orphanages (and after working with Mary Gauthier on The Foundling) that I realized that this darkness is a shadow, a shadow cast on my daughters’ hearts by their birth mothers, always present never seen, and that, this darkness, will never go away. Being abandoned as a baby by one’s mother, no matter what the circumstance, is not an easy reality to face up to.
When you adopt a child from China they give you a dossier of very official looking paperwork with very little information about your child. One piece that is in every dossier is the “police report” which outlines where your child was found. According to the police reports our eldest daughter was found beneath the tax bureau gate and our youngest was found in a ditch by the side of the road. These are not images that are easily shook…and then you begin to think about the twisted meanderings of Fate, of all the convoluted circumstances that took them from that lost dark night, into your home, into your heart:
One is left in a ditch by the highway / the other by the tax bureau gate/Wherever you come from/that’s where you go/They lie staring at the stars and they wait/They lie staring at the stars and they wait.
If you’d like to catch up on some past blogs about the Renmin Park album, just click on a link:
Renmin Park – A Few Bags Of Grain
Tags: cowboy junkies, Little Dark Heart, Mary Gauthier, Renmin Park, The Foundling
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Mary Gauthier – The Foundling
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
I had the great pleasure of producing Mary Gauthier’s new album, The Foundling, this past winter. It’s an intensely personal collection of songs, best described in her own words:
I was born to an unwed mother in 1962 and subsequently surrendered to St. Vincent’s Women and Infants Asylum on Magazine Street in New Orleans, where I spent my first year. I was adopted shortly thereafter but left my adopted family at fifteen. I wandered for years looking for, but never quite finding a place that felt like home. I searched for, found, and was denied a meeting with my birth mother when I was 45 years old. She couldn’t afford to re-open the wound she’d carried her whole life, the wound of surrendering a baby. The Foundling is my story.
Working with Mary on these songs and talking about the stories and the issues that revolved around them allowed me to finally focus on and conceptualize the album that became Renmin Park. It was an intense and wonderful experience. Latent Recordings has the great honour of representing The Foundling in Canada. Here are some links to some early reviews of the album.
Take a listen to the album for free and if you like what you hear buy a copy.
Tags: Mary Gauthier, The Foundling
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