Field Study

This record is the result of a year's indiscriminate research of interesting facts. I love to examine things. When I was ten i had a microscope. I looked at skin, bugs, plants, blood. The World in a Drop of Water. When a friend recently suggested I write about what amazes me, I remembered my early days, in love with naive scientific detail. Songs 1-6 are subtitled Songs About Science and Nature That Are Secretly Also About My Family. I live with a volcano and an edible mammal, and together we make like the protozoa under the microscope. We all like owls a lot these days too. Songs 8-15 are subtitled Yukon Suite, and are an accounting of a favourable journey I took in July 2000. The Yukon Arts Centre ferried twelve Canadian artists around the northern territories for three weeks (flying in planes and helicopters! hiking in the treeless mountains! rafting through grizzly territory! glaciers! heartfelt drinking and dancing!) and then asked everyone to make something of the trip. I was lucky to be there, and these songs are about what happened and what I saw. But really it's all about death. Or really it's all about teeming life. A lot of it is about plants. I wish I had written a song about plankton. I didn't write the last song, it's a very good song. It says "don't miss the plums in the autumn, that's when they're ripe my boy. Let the mighty storm bring you fear, the little wind bring you joy". After a year of winding research and fieldwork, I offer The Song of the Little Wind as my concluding thesis. Veda Hille, February 14, 2001