Greening

We could have nice things

The Greening, copyright Alma Drake 2026, Creative Commons (Attrib.)

We really could have nice things.

It wouldn’t be that hard, even. We could love the world and it would love us back, and everything and everybody could flourish and we’d all live happily ever after.

Okay, it might be harder than that, but fuck’s sake let me dream a little.

Stop me if you’ve heard me say this one before, but the essential work of a songwriter is to be the voice of the land, and I take that work seriously. It involves being quiet and sitting very still, and I am quite good at that. It also involves opening your consciousness up to receive the messages all around you, which is … trickier.

Robert Moss wrote an amazing book called Sidewalk Oracles, which is an extremely fun and eye-opening read. It’s about asking a question and watching the sky, the land, the trees, the people, the traffic, the birds … and sussing out the answer. It can be literal or symbolic. It can take a while to unfold. Maybe you have a two-part answer, and you have to wait until you get a phone call or see a billboard for the penny to drop. It’s a hugely entertaining practice and I highly recommend it.

Point is, that’s the mindset you have to cultivate if you are going to be a songwriter in service to Pachamama. And that is definitely a main driver of my creativity.

This song got written in stages, morphed quite a bit from initial idea to fully baked, and then decided it wanted a chorus, which actually doesn’t sound at all bolted on to me. The guitar part came first, as one of the first official move-in acts of my brother’s old 1969 Gibson J50 when she moved into the SoundWorks studio. I was playing her between clients and this whole … thing showed up, and I caught a recording on my phone with what I thought was going to be the melody.

Then I got to thinking about that melody, and realized it was crap and totally changed the plan. It had legs, and ended up with words.

I played it at our Family Folk Machine open mic, and so many people told me they loved it that Jean and I decided to do it, not this coming season, but for Spring 2027 (because it’s all about the spring), which is when I realized it wanted a big fat anthemic chorus, and that had to be right, because it literally took me 10 minutes to go from “song with no chorus” to “song with a chorus that has always been there but I couldn’t see it until now.”

The lyrics were inspired by … Spring. Michael and I frequently walk a trail that goes through some woods, kind of the no-man’s land between Iowa City and Coralville. We started walking there in autumn, which was as gorgeous as autumn can be, and then it got … gray and brown. Ho hum. Sometimes it would snow and that was gorgeous in its own way, but largely, it was gray and brown and bleh. And early spring here was dry and worrisome, so it remained gray and brown for what seemed like a really long time, until it rained, and the very next day, BAM green. Undergrowth undergrew. Tiny little flowers sprang up like jacks-in-boxes. The entire place was totally transformed, with just a few drops of life-giving water from our beloved friendly local RainFather. What a day!

Lyrics

We woke up to a verdant world
So long stuck in the gray and brown
The rains came and the green came down
The sudden surge of life force
Like a magic wand was waved
And flowers fled their winter caves

Into a world of warmth and color
Where the sun shines on everyone
And life is thriving on the border
Of dreams and poetry
Mythology and reason

Chorus
And we rise, high enough to see the bigger picture
And we rise, high enough to see there are no borders
Until we know that Green is how the earth says
I love you, I love you, I love you

What could we do if we could harness
This wild eruption of spring?
We could make nearly anything
What kind of world could we fashion
if we fell back in love with the land?
If we touched Her with loving hands?

We’d make a world where trees are teachers
And eagles show us how to fly
Imagination would be a sacrament 
And holiness would live 
between Earth and Sky

Chorus

I see a day where we live in peace
No more fearing each other’s grace
Love will rise when our guard falls away
When every woman walks in freedom
And every child is safe and fed
And we no longer by force are led

In a world where equality
means every being has enough
to be well and thriving peacefully
Justice, honesty
And truth and love

Chorus

Gear Box

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

Songwriter’s Workshop

The riff this thing is built on is reminiscent of a hell of a lot of other folk-rock songs, and I can’t deny that. There are bits of Tom Petty, Bill Withers, Cat Stevens, Stephen Stills … and bits of me in there, too. And a 4-1 progression is not new by any stretch of the imagination. The frame is pretty simple, but it’s what happens inside the frame that really matters.

Or so I’m telling myself. But honestly, the song is solid, feels good. I can’t complain. At all. And the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, including one person who said, “I think this is my favorite song ever.” Aw, thanks, my friend!

The structure is a little different, having a verse that’s really two parts, and very distinct from each other, and a chorus which combines them both into one big … thing. Three parts, and I would definitely not call the second part a “pre-chorus,” whatever that is. We can call them A, B and C, which is what people who know musicy stuff would call them.

So the A part is that 4-1 progression, F to C a bit, and then Am to G to F, and back into the F to C thing again.

The B part starts on a 5 chord (G), then goes to the 2 chord (Dm), which is kind of hep, because the 5 chord is technically the “dominant 7th,” but I hate dom7 chords, so I play a G5 there, no major 3rd at all, and definitely no 7. But the fingering of that G5 puts a D on the B string, and that carries into the Dm chord which carries the 7th in (that F natural which is what makes it a Dm), while keeping the D on the B string in place as a common tone. After the Dm we have another F, and then back to G5. The second half of the B part doesn’t just repeat the same chords - we start on the Dm, move to the F, and then we bring in an Am, then go to the G5 and land on the F chord which takes us straight back into the cool riff and into the chorus.

The chorus is cut from the cloth of both A and B parts, and it hangs together really nicely.

Does any of this really matter to the listener who doesn’t know what the heck any of this means? Why yes, I do believe it does, because they can feel that solid energy building up. The repeating motifs add to the structural stability of the whole song, and when the chorus hits, it feels sooooo good. I seriously cannot wait to hear this sung by the choir. It’s going to rip the doors off the place!

Sound Healer’s Planet

There are so many ways this song is therapy. The C-F progression is an amygdala tamer. The lyrics carry images, ideas, love, peace, people living in service and harmony. It’s a wonderful dream to have.

And creativity is the voice of the creative collective unconscious. Increasing numbers of people want to return to some version of earth-centered and matrifocal existence where we treat each other with reverence and live lightly upon our Great Mother who gives us every breath and every sip of water and every bite of food and every thing else, who literally is every cell in our bodies. We are Her. She is us. And the sooner we get that, on an intellectual level at the very least, the better.

All music shared on this Stack by me is my own, or co-written and used by permission of my co-writers. None of this stuff was created or written using AI or any other artificial means of production.