Nashville’s Tristen Gaspadarek is known for — among many other things, like her preternatural sense of melody, energetic live shows and emotive vocals — lyrics that could easily find homes in a poetry collection. It’s appropriate, then, that she often finds as much inspiration in the written word as she does the recorded. Channeling that inspiration, she recently set Edgar Allen Poe’s 1849 poem “A Dream Within A Dream” to music, accompanying her psychedelic-tinged take on the poem with an appropriately trippy, dreamlike video.
Videos by American Songwriter
“I first turned a poem into a song on my last record CAVES,” Gaspadarek explains. “Boris Pasternak’s ‘Winter Night’ felt especially like a song and I wrote the music immediately. I felt the same way when I read Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘A Dream Within a Dream,’ a song that nails our impermanence, and, as Albert Einstein said best, our ‘optical delusion of consciousness.’ So I brought the words to rehearsal and when my band began playing this blues jam spontaneously, I grabbed the sheet of paper and began singing.”
The video comes in tandem with the November 15 release of Saturnine, Gaspadarek’s debut collection of poetry. We’re proud to share a poem from that Cosmic Thug Press collection below, the touching and, given the week’s events, timely “The Heart Speaks Kindness Through Ugliness Sometimes.” The collection features 18 poems that sparkle with the same introspection and empathy found in Gaspadarek’s music.
“How can you separate lyric writing from poetry?” she asks. “One meant for the page, the other meant to be heard? Maybe. Both need rhythm, both need rhyme, and at the bottom is truth or emotion. And when I say truth, it is not for righteous concern, but for love. Connecting ourselves to the patterns of life and even if we’ve never been through it, it feels familiar because we understand those motivations. They are woven into our very being. We’re very predictable creatures after all. When all else fails, I can turn to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass first published in 1855, and find 2016. I can read Ferlinghetti’s “I Am Waiting” written in 1958 and find it particularly perfect in describing the way I feel about my country, right now. I find comfort in knowing that my pain is not special but shared by all, forever. And the great poets and songwriters have captured that universal flare.”
Read “The Heart Speaks Kindess Through Ugliness Sometimes” and watch the video for “A Dream Within A Dream” below.
THE HEART SPEAKS KINDNESS THROUGH UGLINESS SOMETIMES
language echoes a phrase repeats catches on
what if it wasn’t the word but what the word meant context
an action
a reaction
in a specific environment on earth
what is the message? what did we do?
is it over yet?
it’s something you do not think.
young ones woke up
on september eleven
to the trouble we had made when someone returned the favor
our parents watched wars from couches afar
in photos
leaked from hero photographers
these kids of abundance
not recognizing
that the guilty would justify their crime with mental gymnastics
anger
and a totalitarian paper God
but you!
i know you
our identical fingers trace the lineage of
a privilege that comes with each lighter shade
or a grandparent to intervene
say what you see read what you read and in the real world when it’s just us love me
but really spend time with me don’t put me in a glass jar tighten the lid
and tap on the glass
the heart speaks kindness through ugliness sometimes
