The Clearing

Album: released as a single (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • After the fires burn out, there's a clearing - a place to build something new. The singer-songwriters Misty Boyce and Doe Paoro (Sonia Kreitzer) wrote this song following the 2018 California wildfires, using the fires as a metaphor for recconing that was taking place amid the #MeToo movement.

    "It just felt like the end of the world, which now I see was just a shadow of what the end of the world could look like," Boyce told Songfacts. "A total identity shift was happening for women culturally across the board, and now we're in the midst of another shift or a continuation of that shift. It seems like there's a clearing now where it's out. The women's struggle is out. People are now seeing what we've been dealing with. We're contending with what we've dealt with. We're dealing with things we suppressed just to keep surviving, and now there's a real opportunity from that clearing to build something better. Are we going to take that opportunity and build something better, or are we just going to muck it up?"

    "Women have just as much capacity to be selfish and self-serving and vindictive and power hungry as men," she added. "So are we going to do it better? We're going to have to be honest about who we are in order to do that."
  • Boyce and Paoro share lead vocals on the track; all the instruments were played by Boyce and Jon Joseph, who also produced it.
  • So how do we build something better in this metaphorical clearing? Boyce doesn't know, but thinks we need to embrace the chaos and be open to solutions. "I think the tendency to say 'I know' is what got us into this mess to begin with," she explained to Songfacts. "Nobody f--king knows anything."

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