We Still Have Sky by Lisa Cerbone Reviewed by James Diaz

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     What can our art hold? How much can it, and we, bear? Art is a very particular and deeply personal place, a hand-built-home, perhaps, to better understand and move through our pain, to sort through and make real the shadows upon the wall. A place we go with our wounded stories in tow, to make meaning from the ashes, to be sometimes simply the hand that we needed to reach out to us, long ago, in that confusingly dark night of our lives. And how hungry most of us were for simple reassurances then, simple breaks of light through thick heavy familial and worldly grey fog. 

On her fifth album, We Still Have Sky, Lisa Cerbone begins with a drive, singing:

"We drive for the longest time
We don’t have a destination
Clouds lay low on the wire
Maybe something will be revealed in the miles"

Maybe, something. We all know those moments when we wait desperately for something to be revealed to us through trying circumstances, through pain and pain's dizzying confusion, through the miles we drive just hoping to catch a glimpse of a proverbial shooting star through the night's infinitely unfolding sky. And how like the sky we would wish to be. And how there is, even with all the losses, sky still above us. 

"Your eyes are the sad kind
But your shoulders are strong
Maybe there will come a time
When we can speak about it" 

Lisa continues in "Tomorrow". Maybe one day we can talk about what has happened. Or maybe not. Nothing is more uncertain than closure. But in this moment, there is simply driving. Driving with someone dear to our story. Letting thoughts get caught up in the miles, unspooling themselves from our dark inner tangle, hoping for just a glimpse of another kind of light. That slant-wise light that reaches us in our desert. We wish, as Michael Eigen says, that it were different, easier. But what choice do we have when illumination shines through injury? And so we make room for this as well, all the wounds that can never entirely close, but in that bittersweet breach, a kind of enduring flame that burns, alive, at our center. 

Cerbone, I believe, quite literally sings the inner child. Gives inner-child voice and a safe place to be heard, witnessed, and reassured. Which is to say that Lisa is in part singing from inner-child to inner-child. This is not to infantilize at all the complex, powerful, and beautiful art that Cerbone makes. Rather, I believe Lisa's musical oeuvre is courageously engaged in this emotional excavation of core wound, of turning the story of what happened into what is happening still, as such wounds are felt long after their superficial healing, in order to draw attention to the wounded-child that lives still within the adult. 

For many of us, it can be too painful to consider that a young and wounded version of ourselves still lives within us and accompanies us throughout our daily lives, whether we feel its presence or not. But we miss something precious when we cannot bear to know what is there within us. We carry all the innocence of that child as well as all of its heartbreak and soul-shatter. And this is the profound effect of Cerbone's art, to suggest to us that it is also this basic core goodness in us that could not be totally taken from us, and that, like an ember, must be blown upon in order to bring a warmth to life in us that both the world, and those who were once tasked with teaching us the world, sought, through its/their own, brokenness, to take from us. 

In one of my favorite songs, Written in The Stars, Cerbone touches upon this painful emotional country as she sings:

"All the facts point
To the truth
That it was not your fault
But somewhere down deep
When you can’t sleep
You are not so sure"

The things we thought we had buried come back to haunt us. Trauma is a haunting. Emotional ancestors that beg to be fully felt so as to be able to be finally laid to rest? No. Not finally. There is, we find, no finality to this hard work of feeling the unfelt. The unbearable. The untold. Part of that work begins, but doesn't end, in talking to the child we once were. Because even when we don't, we come to find, as Cerbone writes, that:

"It speaks to you
In your sleep
It’s a passenger
In the car
You thought you buried it deep
In the yard
It’s written there in the stars"

It was not your fault. How many times might we hear someone else speak these reassuring words to us, and yet it is only when we speak them to ourselves that they truly take on flesh. This, then, is a song that encourages our having that difficult but necessary conversation with ourselves. 

In "I've Got to Get Myself Back to You" Cerbone sings a mournful dirge for the seemingly ever present ambivalence of reconnecting to the land of the inner-child:

"I've got to get myself
back to you..." 

I let too much of the world in
When I should have
Kept you near

But you get so close
To the wound
I think I should protect it
Protect it"

Protecting our wounds. Our story, They are of a piece, it seems. Our wound-story. Gentle hands are required when turning the brittle pages in the book of our young-life. And so often these hands shake and tremor, knowing the territory is littered with traps and places where the bottom fell out from beneath us, and could easily again, even in the memory of it. In that perilous return:

"Back to our long story
Inside a house where things stay put:
The table, the chairs
The cat on the stairs
The laughter and care
Needs protecting
Protecting" 

Throughout every song on this record there is a persistent effort to reconnect the disconnections made in trauma's long shadow. To converse with the fragility of our past, with the inner-memory of loved one's whose love often confused us even if, or especially because, it was never entirely absent in the painful chaos of home. How to hold in our own two hands these disparate threads of our experience, and to make conversation with the voices of both then, and now? Partly it is done through, and in time. Some wounds can never even be touched upon or voiced out loud. Some, only partially heal. And those that do teach us how to have great compassion for ourselves in having survived truly devastating life circumstances. Not everyone makes it. We know this, only too well. 

In Home For The First Time, Cerbone sings, metaphorically, one senses, in part, of herself:

"She said she could always talk
But recently just learned to speak
Words were empty
With no meaning
Something thrown to the street"

Until, eventually:

"Words started flowing
To match the way shе was feeling
Backwards, sideways on the page
A kiss on the forehead"

Ending on an incredibly moving note of the chosen families we come to make for ourselves in this life, Cerbone sings:

"Sometimes there are those
Who are kinder than our own families
They see you only
Understand the ache and longing

Brings you home
For the first time"

Home. For the first time. A home at the end of the world, as Michael Cunningham phrases it. 

I've talked much about the profoundly moving poetry of these songs, but the musical composition of these pieces would almost require a whole review of their own. They are so meticulously matched and threaded to the mournful subject matter, and sometimes, as on You Led Me Down to The Water, an almost baptismal sound of pure river, of small, tender joy rushing to the surface. Cerbone is a masterful and attentive composer. With each record she has created musical universes like none other. Yes, they are each innovative, daring, painful, and heavy works. But more than this, I think, they are like essential brutally honest novels in a series that is a life. And of what it means to spend one's life getting to know one's life, much like that "home, for the first time" Cerbone sings of. And despite all that was taken so early from us. 

What an incredible gift that we have music such as this to accompany us in that same arduous, scary, and uncertain work of fitting the pieces back together again, and of honoring the spaces that cannot be filled in entirely. 

Our world seems increasingly to be moving further and further away from gentleness and compassion, for self and for other. In the midst of such harsh, uncaring moves, what can music do? More than you might think. It is not by accident that the power of song has been a constant companion to the oppressed and hurting throughout time. Sometimes we sing together. Sometimes we sing alone, But that when a song does find us, we are alive to sing it.

​Let us be alive when the song finds us.

Home, for the first time.

Like a kiss upon the forehead. Like a hand upon a shoulder. Cerbone knows that it takes as long as it takes to tell this story. And that we will always be telling this story. Each time, a little differently. Each time, another layer of shame and pain making room for bloom. "We Still Have Sky" is a transcendent testament of all that remains in each of us despite what was done to us. And in remaining, demands to be told and retold, again and again. Until we get it right. No, not right. But something very close to it. Something like: home, for the first time. Home. At last. And inside ourselves... 




Lisa Cerbone's We Still Have Sky is now available from  Caldo Verde Records and Lisa Cerbone Music.