What Does It Sound Like When You Break Bread?
When I was a little girl, one of my very fondest memories was going to our local bakery, Lombardi’s, on the weekends with my grandfather. Just about every other week, he would make a Hungarian dish that he was well known for, chicken paprikash. To accompany this dish, he would always get a loaf of French bread from the bakery. When we brought the French bread home, I’ll never forget that snapping sound as we broke into it to then dip into our goulash. Sometimes we would cut it with a knife and that sound of steel on hard bread is something that I’ll never forget. It was a sound of nourishment because I knew what was coming— that lovely, hard on the outside, soft on the inside, piece of bread.
Remembering the sounds of breaking bread and the anticipation of nourishment for my soul is something that I drew from when creating the music for my album, “Breaking Bread: Songs of Reconciliation.” Different instruments, the way that they are played together, and their respective tones elicit and convey different emotions and feelings. The melancholy created by a muffled trumpet is contrasted by the elation of a trumpet played in the mariachi style. Same instrument, two different emotions. I went deep into my memory bank of sounds, songs, and styles for each song on this album. I’m blessed to have been listening to music actively for my entire life. Starting with my father who raised me on Bach, Beethoven, and Toto. To my mom who raised me on The Beatles, BeeGees, and Gordon Lightfoot. To my grandparents who raised me on Lawrence Welk, Johnny Mathis, and Frank Sinatra—with a splash of Hungarian folk music tucked in there. Then there was my sister who enlightened me with the sounds of New Kids on the Block, Prince, and Reba McIntire. And the local radio stations are where I found rap, hip-hop, and R&B. It’s been an eclectic upbringing, to say the least.
When we bring all these sounds and genres together, it makes for a very eclectic album—a true representation of the music that nourished my soul growing up. While each song has its own sound, beat, and vibe, together, they musically tell a story: my story, an American story. Growing up in the US, you are exposed to such a wide range of music, both domestic sounds, and international flavors. I’m fortunate enough to have had them all. Plus, traveling abroad opened my ears up to the sounds of Europe and Central America.
When arranging the songs for “Breaking Bread: Songs of Reconciliation,” I wanted to tell a story with lyrics but also through the instrumental arrangements. I wanted the listener to understand the emotions and feelings that I’m trying to convey, even if the words are nowhere to be found. It’s a gift to be able to marry those well. I’m fortunate to have had so many diverse experiences and songs to pull from. When you listen to this record, my hope is that you realize no two songs sound the same but they all fit together to tell a cohesive story. I’ve arranged the album into acts to be listened to like one is reading a story. Each act within the album has also been arranged to follow an arc, one that is both lyrical and musical. Like a thread that stitches everything together, you should be able to listen to one track and understand its flow both from the preceding track and the following track.
Now that you know the background of music for these songs, let’s dig into a few of them.
“Gift from the Sea,” tells the story of a romantic encounter where one partner is left wondering if the encounter was just a brief moment in time, or will last for a lifetime. When I was thinking about the scene and setting for this song, I had visions of the famous beach scene from the movie “From Here to Eternity” starring Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. This film was set in the 1940s, during WWII. I imagined a smoky, jazzy horn, like one that Louis Armstrong would have played, alongside some beachy sounds. I never imagined that the beachy sounds would actually take me to the beach, but to get the right opening wave sounds, I found myself heading to my favorite beach in California, Shell Beach, to gather some rolling wave recordings for the first few opening seconds of the track. If this was going to be a song about a romance in California then you need a ukulele thrown in there for good measure. But how do you create a heart-longing, romantic musical vision with ukuleles since they tend to be upbeat in nature (tell me when was the last time you heard a sad ukulele?)? You throw some classical strings into the mix to make it sound more symphonic and romantic. When you hear this song, I hope you can see yourself there, on the beach, listening to the sounds of the ocean from sea shells, and wondering if you’ve picked up a special one for all time, or if it needs to float on back out to sea.
“A Memory,” is a great example of a song that had direct influence from another song. Through “A Memory,” we learn the story of a couple that has been through a divorce. Some time has passed, as has some reflection, and the lyrics convey the desire to let the past go and forgive the situation and the individual. When one goes through a divorce, it can feel like a piece of your soul has been ripped out. Figuratively, your heart gets torn in two. When I was growing up, Guns N’ Roses was the rock band to be. There was no one belting out those high notes like Axl Rose, or shredding the guitar like Slash. I envisioned this song as a rock ballad. But rather than a rock ballad telling the story about being on the road and wanting to be closer to home, it was more telling the story that nobody wants to tell: playing a role in a failed marriage. The one rock ballad that I’ve probably listened to the most in my life is “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses. There are so many beautiful elements to that song: piano, string quartet, Slash having a guitar solo like no other, and the sounds of the rain. All of these unique elements mesh together seamlessly in that song. I thought the elements of that song worked so well for my divorce ballad, that my sound engineer replicated the exact amp that Slash used for his guitar solo in “November Rain.” Plus, we emulated that style of guitar solo and have our own pointed one that cuts the song, just like a divorce cuts a relationship and those in it. “A Memory” also happens to be around the same time stamp as “November Rain,” noting that it takes a bit of time to unravel the parts and pieces of a divorce, as well as to heal from it. Hopefully, through this song, you will be able to hear the grittiness of this event, as well as the peaceful wave of forgiveness that washes over everything at the end.
Lastly, I’ll share “Meet You Soon,” a song that highlights the longing for parenthood. When I started to climb into my late 30s, right around the time that I was writing the album, I had to face the reality that I would not be able to have a child naturally. At this point in my life, I was a long way off from meeting someone, and it seemed like notions of parenthood were going to be something that I would have to let go of. I think even greater than that was the understanding that aging is part of my story. While it’s part of all of our stories, for women, aging has some additional factors that go along with it, things that you just don’t think about in your 20s. So, here I was, longing to be a mother, watching everyone around me be a mother, and knowing that my time had not yet come and most likely was not going to. The song that immediately came to mind when thinking about the lyrics to this song was a lullaby most of us have heard, “Hush Little Baby.” I wanted to use the melody and arrange my own lyrics to it. My sound engineer and I worked to find the right synthesizer track to fit into the traditional melody and landed on this haunting, jack-in-the-box tune. It works perfectly for this song. When your heart is longing for this gift that you realize may never come, it feels like you are being toyed with, and it is sad, painful, and hurtful. It’s all of those melancholy emotions, as well as bitterness, rage, anger, and disgust. The beautiful thing about music is that we can take a classic tune that everyone knows and has their own memories associated with it, and reinvent it to convey some of those same memories of the past but an understanding of where someone is at in the present. When that song reminds you of children, and all you want is to have your own child to nurture and care for, when that time doesn’t come, that song takes on a completely different meaning. What was once a beautiful nursery rhyme becomes something of a dark, tormenting, and somber noise.
While I may not have been able to record the sounds of my grandfather breaking bread for our Hungarian meals all those years ago, I pray that through listening to these songs and hearing these sounds, you are filled with the same nourishment. That your soul feels a little lighter and that your heart is made a little more whole through the connections that you’ve made while breaking bread with this music.
Pre-save “Breaking Bread: Songs of Reconciliation,” out July 15.