Bones Turned to Bread

Finally! New music!

Bones Turned to Bread, copyright Alma Drake 2026, Creative Commons (Attrib.)

An open letter to Iowa’s Future Governor, Rob Sand.

Congratulations, Governor, on your sweeping victory! I have every faith that you will bring desperately needed accountability to our State government, and do your level best to make sure that Iowa’s kids have access to the nutrition, education, and health care they truly need and deserve. Thank you for your commitment to these issues.

I also have faith that with a little support, your stance on trans people can be gentled, and you will come to understand that our trans friends, kids, and families have every right to live empowered, healthy, normal, loving lives being exactly who they are.

But what I really want to address with you today is something that hits a little closer to where you live. You and your running mate, and your families, are generational farmers, which is a wonderful thing and to be commended; however, I fear that you are turning a blind eye to a worsening situation here in Iowa that is endangering the lives of children especially, and women largely, but no one is immune.

We have the highest rate of cancer of any state in the nation.

This did not happen on your watch, but Governor, you raised your hand at this time and worked your butt off to get this job, and so this has become your problem. And we’re gonna need you to use the same fiery courage with which you have fought the corruption in our current administration to confront an industry which you and your running mate are eyebrow deep in: the Agriculture Industrial Complex.

Runoff from livestock confinements, fertilizers, and pesticides has infiltrated our ground water system, rendering much of the drinking water we depend on for our very survival permanently poisonous. The tremendously important Jordan Aquifer, that enormous source of pure, sparkling, precious water, is now so full of toxins, including PFAS, that scientists report it will never recover, not even in a million years. This loss is crippling, and as droughts caused by climate change become more and more frequent and deadly, additional losses of drinkable water sources will be more than we can bear.

Governor, we need to you do something about this. Don’t order more studies, they’ve been done. We know what’s causing this. Don’t call in more experts, we have the experts here in Iowa, who have been studying this for decades, who know us, who understand the culture and the land better than anyone else could. They know what needs to happen. Let them do it.

It’s going to cause massive upheaval and probably some pain, but goddammit, Governor, how many kids do we have to watch die of this fancy new untreatable juggernaut bone cancer that turns kids’ bones to the consistency of French bread? I have personally watched three in the last two years. I don’t think I can watch anymore without my heart breaking past the point of no return. Women are being diagnosed with breast cancer in unprecedented numbers. Men are dying of lung, liver, and prostate/testicular cancers, also in record numbers.

Please, Governor, for the love of Iowa, please, step up and face down Big Ag. We cannot allow them to continue to do the harm to families and whole communities that they are doing.

A lot of people voted for you because they trust your integrity. Do not let us down on this issue. Our lives truly, in actual fact, depend on you making some extremely hard decisions. You fought for this job; now fight for us.

Your hopeful constituent,

Alma E. Drake

Lyrics

They came for the water, they stayed for the land
They came for a future to make with their own hands
They came for the beauty, but they worked too hard to see
That what you try to tame can never be free

The water was a legend, told the world around
Pure and sweet and perfect, just waiting underground
They swore to protect it, to make the water last
Now we take it for granted, and it’s drying up fast

Chorus
There are some truths to uncomfortable to speak
Like the water’s turned to poison and the air ain’t fit to breathe
The way we make our living has some limits we have found
And the gambles we are taking will grind us to the ground


Out in the country the air will make you sick
Stink of livestock confinements hits you like a brick
Runoff hits the water, unfiltered, rank and rude
The invisible tax for unsustainable food

They killed the Jordan Aquifer, once the pride of our land
They say the water’s so toxic it’ll never be clean again
We’re running out of sources while our cities sprawl
The cancer rate rises while the water table falls

Chorus
There are some truths to uncomfortable to speak
Like the water’s turned to poison and the air ain’t fit to breathe
The way we make our living is about to kill us dead
And our children walk around with their bones turned to bread


The Hochunk people called this the Beautiful Land
They sang of the rivers, and the prairies in the wind
12000 years or better they lived and hunted well
In less than 200 we’ve burned this place to Hell

I hate to leave you on such a dire straight
But what we have broken can’t be fixed by more of the same
The clock is running out, and the sand is running down
And we have got to stop this, and the only time is now

Chorus
There are some truths to uncomfortable to speak
Like the water’s turned to poison and the air ain’t fit to breathe
The way we make our living is about to kill us dead
And our children walk around with their bones turned to bread

Gear Box

Played on a ~2000 Gallagher A70 with Blue Magic “Indigo” strings, .012-.053.

Songwriter’s Workshop

This song nearly wrote itself. I attended a meeting in support of our Johnson County Historical Society, which has been under attack by our Republican-controlled state government, who were attempting to close the facility and move all the documents to places unknown, erasing huge parts of Iowa’s history in the process. Iowa, you see, was once an incredibly progressive place, and the current administration does not want us to remember that.

We desegregated schools 80 years before Brown. Yeah. We did. The first woman lawyer in this country was educated, passed the Bar, and went into practice here in Iowa. The first woman mayor in the nation of a town with a population over 10,000 was Emma Harvat, mayor of Iowa City from 1922-1925 (she was also a lesbian, making this doubly cool). We were the first state to put gay marriage into our civil code. The secret was, our Iowa Constitution has this beautiful line in it, saying that if one person has a right, all persons have that same right. Not all White men. All persons. That’s an absolutely radical idea. We have never been perfect, but that one line in our Constitution allows us to reach higher than we might otherwise dream.

We were pretty awesome once. And we could be again, and I hope we will, and soon, because shit, people, we’re dyin’ over here.

At the meeting, one of the presenters, James Larew, attorney for the Historical Society, spoke eloquently and passionately about the Jordan Aquifer, how it was famous all over the world, and was one of the things that brought so many immigrants here when the state was founded. Water is the second most important thing to sustain life, right after air. We can live a couple minutes without air, a handful of days without water, and a few weeks without food. Water is essential survival stuff, and we have squandered that precious, invaluable resource through sheer carelessness and greed. The big ag companies do not give a single shit if Iowans die; they just want to extract everything they can from the land, fuck the water, and clearly, fuck you, too.

I wrote a song about the Jordan Aquifer years ago, one I have never recorded (it is just as sad as Bones), but hearing Mr. Larew’s impassioned and inspiring talk made me want to revisit her.

During the time I was writing this song, m’colleague Jean Littlejohn and I were obsessed with the minor-5 chord change, as several of our songs for the Family Folk Machine session, including another original I had co-written with Morgan Brown, Home in Iowa City, had strong minor-5 hooks.

The minor-5 is such a cool sound. In the key of C, the 5 chord is G; if you replace one note in the G chord, the major 3rd (B) with it’s minor 3rd (Bb), you get the minor-5 in the key of C. Instead of going to a rather cheery sounding C / G / F / C / progression, you get the much more introspective and nuanced C / Gm / F / C /. Way, way cooler.

This song is in the key of G, so we have a G to Dm situation, but instead of moving to the 4 chord, we go to the flat-7, which is F in the key of G. Dm is actually the relative minor of F, so there’s a wonderfully elegant tension in that progression.

As I frequently do, I took this song to the Small But Mighty Songwriters’ Group, going strong since 2014, and asked for some feedback. My colleagues Susan Stamnes and Mike Sauder both had some excellent points of discomfort with some of the lyrics, which were, honestly, exactly the things I was struggling to work through. With their thoughts on board, I was able to resolve those conflicts quickly, and the song breathed easier immediately. Damn it’s good to have a songwriters’ group!

Sound Healer’s Planet

This song is sad. There’s nothing about it that is not sad, except maybe where it’s angry. And rightly so. I am one person, a musician, I have no scientific credentials to bring to the table here. But I am a sound healer, and although I always find hospice work to be sacred, holy, rewarding … this time, it was bullshit. When your clients are 21 and 27 years old, and the other person in your orbit who’s life was erased by this beast was 12, the wrongness crashes the holy, and the grief is real.

And grief is a magnificent teacher.

The above-mentioned minor-5 to flat-7 progression offers a big therapeutic pay-off, though. The pre-frontal cortex perks up and says, “Hey, that’s different,” and curiosity beats anxiety for a bit. The song is slow enough that if you allow your breathing to entrain with the tempo, it adds to that calming effect.

Another songwriters’ group member, Janet, stated after the first time she heard the song, “I don’t think I can hear this again.” It hits. But it is also a call to action, and the only time is now.