Cynthia Alexander is home and she’s taking her time
Cynthia Alexander's homecoming show at the Music Museum. Photo by CHEALSY DALE
Moving gave me a space to be quiet and hear my thoughts,” shares singer-songwriter Cynthia Alexander in the middle of her homecoming at the Music Museum. In 2012 she moved to Seattle to start a new life with her wife, leaving behind a saddened fanbase and a struggling local independent music industry. Now that she’s back for a visit, she talks about the common noises she used to hear while living in Quezon City — the tricycles, the jeepneys, the karaoke machines — and she mentions them with both fondness and relief that she no longer has to deal with them on a daily basis. “Moving gave me a silence which I never had,” she tells her audience.
Her new album, “Even Such Is Time,” is a product of this silence. It features Alexander at her calmest, most peaceful, perhaps most content. Songs like Dressed For Nowhere and What I Left Behind recall the relaxed lounge-y tempo of Canadian singer-songwriter K.D. Lang while St. Cecilia and title track Even Such Is Time echo the sparseness and serenity of American indie-folk band The Innocence Mission. It is no exaggeration to say that this is Cynthia Alexander like we’ve never heard before. Her music has always been known for its anxious energy (Motorbykle, Insomnia, Malaya) and ethereal intensity (Intertwyne, Emptyhanded) that at times touches on the cosmic and spiritual (Owner of the Sky, Comet’s Tail). She has always sounded as if she was frantically reaching out for something bigger, with time running out. Now she sounds as if she’s finally home, content in her inner peace.
Her performance last Saturday was inflected with this calmness, as old songs were more spaced-out, slower, strolling along like someone who had already reached her destination and has all the time in the world. Comfort In Your Strangeness was rendered at a slower, more patient tempo that seems more befitting a song about finding love after a long journey. Intertwyne, already a quiet song, was made more intimate by her slower delivery and her backing band’s hushed instrumentation that isolated her guitar and vocals.
Perhaps the highlight of the night was her performance of Dumaan Ako with brothers Paolo and Miguel Guico of the band Ben and Ben. It was more sedate compared to the punchier rendition in Alexander’s live album “Walk Down The Road.” The edges are softer and the tempo is gentler, with the Guico brothers’ hopeful vocals lending light to a previously dark song. Adapted from a poem by the late Maningning Miclat, the song has always been about depression and carving out your own private space to deal with the sadness, but last Saturday it sounded like a song about release and freedom, especially with the added instrumental outro providing a closure of sorts to a song that once ended with the somber “parang ang puso kong itong nadudurog.” Now it flies away almost triumphantly in the end.
They say people become mellower as they grow older and for Cynthia Alexander, the space of distance and the space of time might be the same thing. In the distance between Quezon City and Seattle — and in the resulting silence — she was able to look back and revisit old songs like St. Cecilia and Even Such Is Time. “They’re really old, they’re older than Motorbykle or Owner of the Sky, even,” she tells the audience. “Somehow, in that quiet, emerged these two old songs. They morphed and they were very ripe when they came out.”
She also finally had the headspace to revisit the poems of her mother, Tita Lacambra-Ayala. “Like all immigrants, I struggled with the distance and my mother’s poetry provided me a sense of connection to home,” she shares. The song What I Left Behind from her new album is based on her mother’s poem, “Coming Back.” It is a song about returning to the place you left and seeing pieces of you still there and it sounds exactly how nostalgia feels. “Always my fate again, when I come back to find that what I had left behind is waiting, still there waiting for me,” she sings in a lower pitch than we’re used to hearing. It’s the same Cynthia Alexander but a bit different, like a long-lost friend you’ve known for years.
She ends the show with Owner of the Sky — same song, different tempo. The song, from her second album “Rippingyarns,” used to sound like a hymn to the heavens, with its soaring strings and urgent guitar plucking. But that night, it was slower and more grounded: it sounded like a long scenic stroll around the place you regard as home, the place where you have found your comfort and peace. That place may now be Seattle for Cynthia Alexander, as she returns there after a one-night-only concert (“I know, I know… I have business to attend to, I have to visit my mother,” she says apologetically), but it is also the Philippines of her memory, and on this night, it was the stage, where she shared that feeling with fans who have sorely missed her, and who, for at least a couple of hours, got a taste of the home they used to know.
