There Are No Accidents

On the prophecy of nature and song

You have to watch your step these days. Across the ground, woolly bear caterpillars move in squiggles of obsidian and cinnamon brown. It’s a soundless march, but still, you can almost hear the scuff of their fur as they haul themselves, determined and hell-bent, over tufts of dry grass. Each year, they begin this pilgrimage when the weather turns cold, seeking out shelter for the coming winter. They burrow under logs and hibernate, waiting out the long season by transforming their blood into an antifreeze of sugars. 

When I start to see the woolly bear march, I know that the seasons are shifting. Like the migrating birds who take to the air as autumn arrives, these caterpillars are our seasonal seers, foretelling our certain future: winter is coming. Some even say that the proportion of a woolly bear’s black and brown bands can predict the severity of the winter. The wider the black band, the worse off we’ll be. Think of them like terrestrial tea leaves, to be read and interpreted before they swirl away.

It reminds me of something I also learned about the veery, a kind of bird in the thrush family with a song like a tornado funnel—that the timing of the veeries’ migration each year can apparently predict the intensity of the Atlantic hurricane season.

There are prophets among us. We just have to pay attention and learn to read the signs.

In the book Faith, Hope, and Carnage, the musician Nick Cave talks about how many of his songs seem to have predicted what happened in his life—particularly the tragic death of his son Arthur. “I think songs have a way of talking into the future,” he says. “You write a line that requires the future to reveal its meaning.”

There’s something to that, I think—the mystery of artistic prophecy. How songs, like the woolly bears and veeries, are alive and pulsing with some secret knowledge. I’ve experienced it with my own songs as well. Take this one, for example—a cut track from the LP6 sessions:

This is a voice memo for a song called “Cinnamon Gum,” which I wrote in September 2021, a month before I got pregnant the first time. I barely knew what some of the lines meant, only that I wanted to sing them, that they wanted to be sung. The lyrics came through like a transmission, a loose association of imagery that bled together like a dream. I could not have known then that a new life would come in October (a life I believe, in my bones, would have been my daughter), or that by the end of the year, she would be gone, leaving nothing in my belly but a great aching wave. Why was I singing, that sorrowless September as I walked the yellow meadow, about emptiness and blood and the pilgrim who would leave the shores of me and never return? Where did those images come from? And how is it that it came true?

Like tarot cards, songs are conjurings that come from some shadow place to tell us—in language encoded even to the speaker—who we will become.

There’s a track on LP6 called “Mother Tongue” that also contains some kernels of foresight. In this song, I sing about the pregnancy loss, conflating my damaged motherhood with the fragility of Mother Earth while invoking the names of her creatures: the blue whale, the turtle dove. I also sing, “the history of the river, / it was never ours.” Now, a year and a half later, I revisit the words and am amazed to realize that the nickname I’ve been unwittingly calling my son River in these early months of his life is Turtle Dove. And maybe what I really meant, by way of Nick Cave’s “talking into the future,” was that River’s history—the one who came before him—was a life that was ultimately not ours to keep. 

The idea that songs can serve as our personal Cassandras is a bit out there, I know—as unbelievable, perhaps, as a bird predicting a hurricane. And yet, the words came through, and my life followed its course, and it’s impossible not to wonder at the way the two superimpose, like the kiss of an eclipse. There is something spooky in this revelation, but also something wildly magical. It makes me believe that inspiration really does come from somewhere sacred and unknowable to us. When we trust our instincts, our words, and the flow and exchange of ideas with the universe, we tap into an innate power that enables us to better understand our lives. These are conversations through creation, across space and time.

It’s this kind of mystery that Elizabeth Gilbert is talking about when she tells the story, in her book Big Magic, of an idea for a novel that she abandoned, only to later learn that another writer had picked up the thread of that idea in the ether and was now writing a book about the very same premise.

Inspiration is as alive as the caterpillars at our feet—and as soft and vulnerable to being crushed when we fail to pay attention.

As I’m writing this, my eyes land on a huge tome that sits on my bookshelf: The Book of Symbols. I live under the belief that all things are connected if we just look closely enough. I have organized my life around looking for signs, in a kind of perpetual existential treasure hunt. It’s why I love making albums so much: the search for threads that tie it all together, the lyrical themes uncovered only when the collection is complete.

“There are no accidents,” my great uncle Kumar always said—a sentiment he believed so much that when a book fell on his head in a bookstore while browsing for a gift for my mother, he bought it for her. And that book changed my mother’s life.

When I think about the prophetic nature of songs and the uncanny potential for our past selves to reveal something to our future—when I start to doubt it, I hear Uncle Kumar’s words. There are no accidents. Everything is connected. And I remember that nature is revealing this truth to us all the time.

Just look at the woolly bear, waving the banner of its body, bringing us into the blizzard of tomorrow.

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Come write your own sonic prophecies with me in my upcoming Art of Songmaking workshop, which meets virtually beginning January 14! Registration opens this Friday, November 10, at 10am ET.

Over the course of five sessions, we’ll dissect the anatomy of a song, learning what makes a compelling melody, lyric, chord progression, and more. Each session consists of a mix of lecture, writing exercises, and song share based on weekly songwriting prompts. You'll share your work with me and in small groups, receive supportive feedback, and practice deep listening. By the end of our time together, you'll have an EP's worth of new material and, I hope, a deeper sense of who you are as a songwriter.

This is a space for vulnerability and community, for curiosity and commitment, for asking ourselves, what do we truly want to say with our songs? What messages can we relay to our future selves, and to our world? Messages of hope, humor, love, resilience, tenderness, transcendence… How can our creative endeavors—whether in the form of a simple three-chord pop song or a sprawling poetic opus—tap into a common thread of humanity while celebrating our unique perspectives?

I feel these questions and explorations are more critical than ever. May this gathering be a source of inspiration as well as healing. Solidarity in song.

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