Seated in a humble but delightful Mexican cafe on San Pablo and University Avenue in Berkeley, I begin to write about the coming of my album release, and why it’s named A Larger Dance. I should let you know that I write the songs I most need to hear; I don’t do this consciously of course, but I find it to be so when I hear over and over my own voice singing to me, reminding me. 

Why A Larger Dance? 

Why, when the world seems to be turning itself over so fast it’s hard to stay on top from one day to the next? I confess: I’m a songwriter that went to seminary just before I became a songwriter, just before I knew I could even write songs. I was always seeking meaning, even as a child. Somehow, I feel called to marry meaning and music in songs that address the times that we are in, and my experience of being alive now, hoping that you too can share in my experiences along with your own.  

A Higher Purpose

I have come to believe that everything happens as it does for a higher purpose that we can only come to see by living it. Life is real, and yet it is also an illusion. What is Real is what guides the dance that is our lives, taken individually, taken as a family, a city, a community, a nation, a globe.  The song says, “I know what the world thinks, that it’s all a matter of chance, but the world, and all that happens, is part of a larger dance.” 

A Larger Dance is

A Larger Dance is the dance of all of our lives; it is the dance of the larger cosmos, the dance of you and I,  in which we play a part we don’t yet fully comprehend, but which is the reason for our existence. It is the dance of faith, that we are where we need to be, in the bodies that need to be ours, with the people that we need to meet, with the friends we have lost and found. It is the dance of the meeting of the good and the shadow both in ourselves, and with the other; both in the world and within us. It is the profound faith that there is, after all, a great Good that loves us. And that everything important happens in our lives just as it must.  

Thank you for letting me share my music with you.

On November 1, Kate Magdalena is coming out with her second full length album, A Larger Dance, produced by GRAMMY-nominated-producer Billy Smiley (Johnny Cash, Whiteheart, Clay Aiken, and the Newsboys). The album features some of Nashville’s finest musicians with Fred Eltringham (The Wallflowers and Sheryl Crow), Byron House (Robert Plant and the Band of Joy), Blair Masters (Garth Brooks) and Brennan Smiley (The Technicolors).  The album is mostly original, and also includes covers by Sinead O’Connor (“Take Me to Church”), CS&N (“Southern Cross”), and Joan Armatrading (“Dry Land”), and will be available on all digital platforms November 1.

PREORDER the album today and receive immediately receive 3 downloads “Dry Land”, “Southern Cross”, and “Long Live the Woods”.

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A Vision Offered

It is common understanding no matter what your faith or politics that what we call “the environment” is in a critical phase, but is not receiving the intensive care required for survival. No matter what side of the climate crisis you are on, you care about the earth. You want clean water, and clean air. You want a clean environment in which to live, and in which your children can have a healthy future. It’s not only a question of human rights; it’s a question of protecting and restoring the natural world provided for us, the only home we have. 

Nature is Deeply Healing

Like many of you, I am a lover of the natural world. I grew up on the asphalt pavements of New York City, and swam in the swimming pools of Scarsdale; but I appreciated the magnificent world of nature I was introduced to during my summers at camp in Maine. The feel of walking on pine needle carpets under canopies of tall pines, the unutterable beauty of the lake, misty in the morning, brilliant at midday as I swam. I knew then, as I do now that nature is deeply healing, not to be used as a dumping ground, an endless resource to be plundered. 

Envision a New Earth

I moved across the country in my twenties because I fell in love at first sight with San Francisco, but more because my body, soul, and spirit longed for sunshine, blue skies, and great open spaces. In the decades between then and now, I have watched as our land has been fracked and drilled, our air space is ‘aerosolized’ with chemicals, our oceans decimated by radiation, oil spills, and plastic garbage beyond reckoning. Weather has gone haywire, and no matter where you live, you and your families have been affected. Can it hurt to envision an earth new again? Why not let our individual and collective imaginations be the powerful generator Einstein said it could be? 

Inspiration of New Earth

This vision is what inspired my writing of “New Earth.” It’s an imagination, in which a giant condor “offers me his wingspan for a ride” and we soar above the earth. As we journey, I behold the great vistas of green and blue, and am aware of the deeply sacred gift we have been given in all of nature. This vision of nature restored is a vision I offer to you to hold as well, through the song. May this vision take root in our hearts and minds, so that we can together bring about an earth restored.  

My gift to you, my family, fans and friends is a FREE DOWNLOAD of this latest single New Earth. Thank you for your continued support of my music! Click Here to get the free download of New Earth.

Watch Lyric Video: New Earth Music Video

Read Press Release: New Earth Press Release

New Earth, By Kate Magdalena

In the garden I was walking
Morning early, I wasn’t talking
As the sun beamed honey on the wide horizon,
All at once I stopped to listen
the birdsong a sonic glistening
I shivered with a strange kind of delight—or was it fright?

Suddenly a bright condor swept on down
And offered me his wingspan for a ride
Straddling my legs side to side
Put my arms around his neck—we began to glide

Over and above the world we flew
Surveying the land below
Blue vistas transporting my soul,
When, all at once, the hills called, green and rolling

And down we went, on a wind to the forested plain
When I found my self standing on the earth again
But it was an earth that was changed, that was made new again

There was no hurt in any land, in any sea or air,
as people were free everywhere

All rights reserved, © 2019 Kate Magdalena Music, LLC

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It was nearing midnight on a warm Saturday night in Nashville. As part of an inspiring music conference, geared towards artists using their music in the context of a larger ministry (The Objective, a conference put on by the Extreme Tour), we had been asked to go to Broadway’s honky tonk, to find people who looked like they could use some help, and minister to them with music. 

I had secretly decided I was going to skip it, and go to sleep, preferring instead to minister to the needy at a more reasonable hour. So when I got to Broadway, and a man seemed to come right toward me, I was kind of astonished! He was dressed in tattered clothes, and wore a large poncho that covered his head and shoulders, his face peered out, strikingly rugged and even handsome, with piercing blue eyes that were no longer bright. 

He told me of how he longed to escape the cycle of heroin addiction but that every time he tried, he would be found in withdrawal on the streets, and taken to the hospital. Only then to be returned to the streets in a vicious cycle from which he could not escape.  

Streets of Any Town Emerges

Streets of Any Town is this man’s story, but it is also the larger story of men and women across America who now live on the streets because they have been forced there for economic and social reasons. 

Streets of Any Town asks the rhetorical question, is it really okay in the United States of America to allow people to live on the street? The song also packs a religious punch with its refrain “the least of you”, recalling Jesus’ words from Matthew 25:45 —- ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ How a society cares for its most vulnerable members is a significant mark of its health.  

Release Date and More

Streets of Any Town is the fourth track from my upcoming album A Larger Dance releasing in October. 

The songs have been recorded and produced by GRAMMY-nominated-producer Billy Smiley (Johnny Cash, Whiteheart, Clay Aiken, and the Newsboys). Streets of Any Town features some of Nashville’s finest musicians with Fred Eltringham (The Wallflowers and Sheryl Crow), Byron House (Robert Plant and the Band of Joy), Blair Masters (Garth Brooks) and Brennan Smiley (The Technicolors).

Streets of Any Town will be playing on local country radio stations across America, promoted by Grassroots Promotion, out of Nashville. Kate hopes that the song, and its accompanying music video may be of use to any individual or agency working with issues of homelessness. 

Click here to Listen/Download Streets of Any Town

The song will be part of BWH Music’s new country collection, “Keepin’ It Country,” releasing in August.

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Be the Lark – Loss and Change

I didn’t know when I wrote this song called “Be the Lark” that the losses and changes to which the song refers, would come in the particular form that they did.

When I wrote the song, I was coming out of a time of deep sadness in which I saw that our country was experiencing great divisions, and that these divisions had also run clear throughout my life, separating me from people that I loved and called my closest friends. This song was to guide and lift myself from grief. The words of the song have seemed almost prescient however, in the intervening months. From out of nowhere it seemed, just as I was beginning to release my first single “Take Me to Church”  from my new collection of recordings done in Nashville, I began to experience mystifying back trouble, so severe as to literally stop me in my tracks! 

Envying the Lark

I have always envied the birds for their ability to fly, but now I’m thinking that birds may envy human beings for our ability to simply sit! I have not been able to sit for the past two months, so I know firsthand how much I’ve missed. Oh the beautiful thoughts that form as we sit! 

The past two months have been a riddle, a riddle that my body would have to suffer, before my mind could make sense of the symptoms. I so look forward to living a normal life of movement and work! It is a strange thing to get up in the morning only to get horizontal again for most of the day.

Yet the words of the song have been a consolation to me during this time because in the last verse of the song, I sing of how important it is to simply be in the experience that you are having, in the moment that you are in, no matter if it is difficult, lifting yourself “on the lark’s ascending wing”.

Lift Ourselves

But how do we do this? How do we lift ourselves on the lark’s ascending wing?

Well, the truth is that we don’t really lift ourselves. Something or someone helps us along at our darkest hour.

For me, that is none other than the Holy Spirit of God. The truth is that I often forget to turn to Him and it is now that I feel the need more than at any other time! It makes it so much easier when I remember that He holds everything, me and you, and the lark, in his hands. It is this faith itself that is the gift allowing me to move forward.

I hope you enjoy this song, and can find springtime meaning in it for your own one wild and precious life!

Click here to listen/download

BE THE LARK
The world has so many choices
So many voices, so much to say
So many singers, so many dancers
I wonder when I will have my day

Sometimes I just can’t understand why
the world happens as it does
Why the road bends, and the loss descends
And you can’t see your way to the end

My friends they up and left me,
without so much as a glance behind
They put up walls instead of bridges,
and to the star of our love went blind
How to be here and stay, when I just want to go the other way
How to hear a new calling, calling me by name

And as I ask I hear the answer,
I hear the answer – a feeling within
It says open, open to the now that lives
on the lark’s ascending wing

It says, Open to the times you’re living in
Open to the moment that you’re in,
Cast your resistance to the wind

Be the lark as you lift yourself above
Be the lark as you lift your world on the wings of love

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There is a kernel of something unknown, deep within myself to which I turn for inspiration in my songwriting, so as to bring something better than I could ever do alone. In essence everything that I write by way of lyric or melody is given to me from this source. I believe that is how it is for all of us, whether we know it or not. Of course, I elaborate on it, refining, editing, remolding what I write to fit what my inner ear is telling me. Honestly, I couldn’t do anything without receiving inspiration. My own thoughts circle rather than flow!

My own mental knowledge of music is limited.

I never studied musical knowledge as a child. But I sang! I say to myself so often, “if only”. If only I had studied piano as a child, my entire life would have been different. I would have gone to the conservatory. I would have studied musical theatre. “I would have …” My mother actually did give me lessons, for about 2 months. The teacher came to our New York apartment with a cigarette (in those days it was perfectly acceptable to smoke in the house). The ashes fell across the keys one too many times and this teacher, who had taught my mother in her youth, held no inspiration for me, or less than none.

Of course, everything happens as it should. And so I arrive late to this game.  Somewhat outside the ball park. There are sounds, and there are meanings that must come into awareness. There are subjects that must be sung about. I feel it in my throat and in my chest, like a pressure that must come out. When I sing to you I share a part of myself with you, my questions and concerns put into sound. My astonishment at living this life—it’s all there. I offer it to you humbly, knowing that ultimately what any of us are is beyond us.

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