Carrie Newcomer’s work as a singer, a songwriter, and a leader of workshops on writing and on vocation often finds her on the road. Though she loves her home in the southern Indiana woods, she loves traveling, too. “After I’ve been home a while, I get restless to be out there on the road again,” she says. “I love meeting new people, and hearing their stories, and singing my songs for them.”
Newcomer was getting ready to do just that, finishing up work on her album Before & After, when she heard from family friend. Would she come for a few days to be an artist in residence during a week of peace and justice studies at the school he was in charge of -- in New Delhi, India? Soon after, the American Center of the American Embassy in India learned of the invitation and asked her if she’d be willing to visit other places in India as a cultural ambassador, in a program sponsored by the US State Department.
All of this was coming up in a short window of time around which she had intense work planned “but I thought, I’m not going to say NO, I’m not going to India! I’ll make this work. Sometimes life just shows up at your door and says c’mon, keep up,” Newcomer says. She had a question for the State Department officials, though. “I have to say my first thought was: do you know what I do? This is the State Department, right? and I’m this activist folk singer type. Are you sure you’re not looking for Carrie Underwood, instead?” The people at the American Center and the American Embassy of India assured her they did not have her confused with the country singer who shares her first name. “They said, we’re looking for music that builds bridges. Your music does that.”
Building bridges, making connections, seeing the spiritual connections in and through the everyday are aspects that have been parts of Newcomer’s work since she first began her life in music. “My spiritual path is part of my life, and so it comes out in my music,” she says.
Not that Newcomer preaches with her music: rather that she invites. Often what she invites is consideration of dimensions beyond the everyday in the everyday, as when she sings of frying eggs that sound like psalms, hymns of geese that fly overhead, and the grace of warm wool socks and good dry towels in her song Holy as the Day Is Spent. She is no stranger to speaking of mystery, either, as in the not quite seen things There Is a Tree, the dual nature of being restless and home loving, in Coy Dogs, and the mystical aspects of change in Before & After. Humor, wisdom, faith. and landscapes of her native Indiana all come into play in Newcomer’s work as well. But how would all this work in India? And what did she do to prepare?
“It came up so quickly that I didn’t really have much time to prepare,” she said. “There were certain sorts of reading I’d done that maybe would be helpful, and I was able to speak with several people who’d been living in India for a while, to learn about cultural things, just so as to be polite -- I’m a midwesterner, I like to be polite!” she said, laughing. “And some things would be the same -- I’d be giving performances, doing my music, being who I am, and I felt very grounded in that. In some ways, though, I don’t think there was any way to prepare, and in some ways that was good, just to lean into it, into this old, old culture that is also modern, and is also incredibly different from anything I’d ever done.”
She was in India for a month, visiting schools and community service organizations during the day and in the evening giving concerts, and as time permitted, meeting with Indian musicians as well. ”They sent me all over the place!” she said. “I was in Kolkata, I was in Delhi, I was in Bengal, I was in the central part, I was in the very south, I was in Chennai, I was in Mumbai.”
What she found, through all the varied landscapes and cultures of the sub continent, was that her songs of family, the search for peace, reflection on the spiritual in the everyday reached across differences in language and background. “ I found when I sang about those things, about grief, about family, about love, that the thread of connection pulled through. I have a song called Geodes, about Indiana rocks. It’s also about finding the shining heart of things, and that connected.”
Newcomer knew her time in India would find its way into her music, as well. Her recording Everything Is Everywhere is part of that. On it, Newcomer brings in the gifts of Indian master sarod players Amjad, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan along with her Indiana musical friends Gary Walters on piano and Jim Brock on percussion, to frame lyrics which speak of connection and change, reflection and mystery, infused with images from her journeys. Newcomer’s voice and poetic spirit reach new levels with connections she makes, both direct and indirect. In the title track she links hope and sorrow and the Arabian Sea and a farmer’s market in Indiana. Melodies and thoughts on prayer and change bring home the sound of India and well as other places of reflection on May We Be Released. The other tracks are equally thoughtful and thought provoking.
As she went to India to serve, to listen, to give the gift of her music, Carrie Newcomer came away receiving gifts of inspiration and understanding as well. “It was a life-changing experience, and one I think I’ll be processing for a long time,” she says.
Since the release of Everything Is Everywhere, Newcomer has had the chance to return for a brief visit to play the songs in India. She is sharing them in concerts in the United States as well. You may find out more of her tour schedule at her web site, carrienewcomer.com.
Newcomer has decided to give the proceeds of Everything Is Everywhere to the Interfaith Hunger Initiative, a program which works to end childhood hunger in Indiana and overseas. She’ll soon be traveling to Kenya to do concerts there in support of their work.
Kerry Dexter is Music Editor for Wandering Educators
You may find her work at Music Road, Strings, Perceptive Travel, and other places online and in print. You may reach Kerry at music at wanderingeducators dot com
Photos by Shiv Ahuna and Jim McGuire