This past week, an album of gorgeous new songs—“The Quiver”—was released. I’m listening to it right now, dazzled. Most of the lyrics and some of the music were written by my sister, Binnie Klein. It’s the premiere album of an indie music project called “In These Trees and Tartie,” and it’s been Binnie’s inspiration, baby, object of devotion, and culmination of years of work. Australian singer Tartie is the vocalist and wrote most of the music—but don’t ask me what “In These Trees” means! Maybe Binnie can explain.
Please allow me to kvell.
Binnie: Yes, please do kvell! And I’d love to explain the project title. For years I’ve been pinning a post-it-note to various bulletin boards where I’ve lived – it’s from a poem by Robert Bly called “Solitude Late at Night in the Woods” and has the phrase ‘’the body is like a November birch facing the full moon/And reaching into the cold heavens/In these trees there is no ambition’”– a notion that is ironically soothing to me, since I’ ve always been pretty ambitious and conflicted about that!’
Susan: What a beautiful image from the Bly poem. But let’s put your conflict about ambition on hold and enjoy my kvelling. This album! Wow!! But I’m not surprised. In a sense, this album has been brewing in you since you were a teenager. Simmering at times, bubbling over at others. And now it’s cooked and ready to be served up. After decadesthat took you other places—a career as a brilliant therapist, a D.J.of a popular music show on WPKN, a memoir—what looks like a “reinvention” as a songwriter is actually a return. “Ripeness is all,” right? This fruit was ripening all your life.
In our family, we all loved the power and relief of words. But we all had our different ways with it, and there were a lot of unrealized dreams. Yosh’s brilliance at Scrabble and the New York Times Sunday crossword (in ink!) was legendary. And those eloquent love letters he wrote to mommy during WWII, quoting famous writers! Our family inheritance—from him, Mickey, our own childhoods—is full of journals, early experiments, fragments of writing-to-be. Most of them were forced by life circumstances to remain fragments.
You and I were luckier—or maybe more determined, or maybe more desperate—to find room for a writing life, despite the obstacles.
Somewhere along the line—was it because I was praised for it by teachers, was it because it was my way out of shame (for being fat, for being “too sensitive”), was I was living out my father’s unrealized ambitions?—I began to feel most alive when I was analyzing, explaining, talking back. The others branded me as stubborn. I didn’t feel stubborn. I felt anxious and misunderstood. But now, arguing with my daughter I see myself in her. And I now think maybe I was stubborn.
You were always a poet. Unlike me—leaping out of bed every morning to shove my unconscious into submission—you allowed it to have its way. You remembered all your dreams, wrote them down, and transformed them into something more mysterious, magical, delicate, and evocative than argument. Your poems were published, won prizes. How does she do that? (I often wondered.) Where do those images come from?
There’s probably a lot of reasons I was drawn to writing poetry, but it can be summed up in the title of the first poem I wrote, which our father kept in his bureau drawer for years: “Loneliness.” I was a moody kid and I’m a moody adult. I have a permeable psyche. Images intrude, first lines of poems, endless observations that I experience as pressing for expression. Then, too, I wished I could have been a popular cheerleader.
Yeah, you and me both. Wasn’t in the cards. And neither was what we started out wanting to do with our lives. If we’d had any financial resources to fall back on, I know I would have pursued a career as a movie critic. I’m pretty sure—am I right?—you would have continued to center your creative life around poetry.
Depends on how far back you go. As a child, I wanted to be a ballerina or an actress. But I decided I’d do better getting an English degree. I dropped out of college in the era of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, then bounced around as a typist but always writing poetry. Finally finished school and went off to Smith College School for Social Work. The career as a psychotherapist suited my interest in dreams and promised (via private practice) the lure of autonomy.
And I became a university teacher (philosophy—there was no cultural or media studies in those days.) We loved and were good at those “day jobs.” You were—and still are—an extraordinarily attuned and inventive therapist. And I was a pretty great teacher, especially when I was helping students to discover what they really wanted to think and write about (often very different from what was prescribed by other academics.) But we both strained against the suppressions of our own creativity demanded by our jobs, and were always working after hours on other projects. For me, that was mostly unlearning academic habits in my writing. For you, it was mostly keeping the poetry alive through music—and your radio show. How did that come about?
I had visited the radio station WBGO in Newark during some grade school trip. It was the kind of old-fashioned station where they produced radio plays and I was fascinated by the “foley” work (that’s how they do the sound effects…little sets of stairs, coconut halves for horses’ hooves, and so on) and being behind a microphone. Throughout teenage years, I was soothed during many a sleepless night by witty, sophisticated late night DJs on WBAI – Bob Fass, Steve Post….and on WNEW, Alison Steele ,“The Nightbird,” who played whole album sides. Music was my companion.
I thank my parents, who, like many immigrant parents, were otherwise pretty exhausted and uninvolved, for buying a used piano and setting up lessons for me. Mr. Levy came to the house for a few years, and I worked on some Mozart sonatas along with sheet music for Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan. A major influence were the long-haired hippie boys who hung around our apartment playing guitars (Mississippi John Hurt, Tom Paxton, Jesse Colin Young). They taught me some chords, and I got my first guitar, a Kay classic acoustic. (I wanted nylon strings because steel were so hard, but this guitar has an especially wide neck. I still have it.)
To those who know you as a therapist or through your radio show, this new life as a songwriter will seem like a late-life reinvention of self. But to me, who has known you all my life, I see it as a glorious coming-out party for poetic Binnie.
But I want to talk a bit about some of the songs. So many seem to be about either holding on or letting go and starting afresh. You begin with “Orchard,” which I take to be about a relationship that’s over but just won’t let go; you’re ready to “let all the fruits fall down,” but he/she/they—damn them—just won’t let it happen, won’t leave the orchard.
Thisis such an interesting observation! I think “they” won’t let it happen because I am haunted by their ghosts. I thought at first, in the songs about a particular early heartbreak (Orchard and Sky, Ocean), that the love without closure, the ‘what might have been’ was standing in my way, making me a victim. But after a while of working on these songs, I can see that it was a “co-creation.”
Can you be enmeshed with someone with whom you are separated? I was, until I realized that it was a way of trying to revive my teenage self, her spirit, her sexiness. That didn’t exactly happen! But something else did – I became a songwriter, and I met incredible musicians and developed a bond with my collaborator, Tartie, that is like no other.
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Tartie is an accomplished singer/songwriter living in Australia who sent me some of her songs for possible airplay on my radio show. I found her voice transporting and very special. So, along with saying “yes’ to her submission, I made a shy inquiry for her to take a look at some lyrics I’d written. “I’ll have a go!” She wrote back, and pretty soon there was an astonishing rendition of “Orchard.”’
It was our first full collaboration, and in producer David Baron we found a most supportive guide. My husband and all-around genius Scott Shapleigh created a storyboard and we found an animator online who did the video. I sent more lyrics to Tartie, and she always came through with gorgeous melodies that enhanced my lyrics.
We were on a roll. So when David said, “You are both really prolific, and there’s such an interesting backstory here…why not do an album?” It was “of course!”
Another of my favorites is “Hailstorm,” which is also—although in a more whimsical, delighted mode—about the “stickiness” of relationships.
This song was such fun to write! And you’re absolutely right; about the ‘stickiness’ of relationships. This song is lighter than some others….a line that didn’t make it to the final version: “thinking of you—I thought of you” is actually my favorite! I adore the images Scott came up with to accompany the lyrics in the video. I love Tartie’s melody and of course, her voice, and the later background vocals from Jen Kreisberg (formerly of Native-American trio Ulali) who brings her signature wailing sound to the production. How lucky was I that she lives in Connecticut?? We got together at her favorite recording studio to get her vocals for “Ablaze” (our climate change anthem) and “Hailstorm.” Thank you, Jen.
At the “letting go” end of things, I love (and can’t stop dancing/bouncing to) “Quiver,” which is full of imagery of opening up, recovery, freshly vulnerable, “budding.” I just love the word itself—“Quiver”—and am really glad you made it the title of the album. But why did you? Or would you rather just let people associate on their own (poets liking mystery and all that…)
Oh yeah, people! You mean people will actually be listening to these songs??? Hold me!
I’m here, darling. Always.
❤ As to the song’s title, and the title of the album, I literally awoke one morning with the word “quiver” on my lips. I said it aloud and went over to the computer. Let’s leave it like an inkblot image! But I will say it’s meant to be positive; and convey the overcoming of obstacles and fear.
And then there’s “Shapes of The Things to Come,” which could easily be applied to the “ripening” and moving forward that is this album: “Why won’t you just move with me through the new shapes of the things to come…We’ll tell our sweet story. We’ll build a better place” The “s” in shapes is perfect—open-ended, multiple. No end to this story.
I’m so glad you like that one. Its meaning still confuses me somewhat. I know that people are in some ways desperately seeking signs of hope in what I consider to be a broken world. I guess it’s a wish, a fantasy.
I love the fact that you can be confused by the meaning of your own words!!
My own fantasy is that everyone reading this will get the whole album. I know our older sister, Mickey, who died in December 2021, would be sending compact discs all over the world if she’d lived long enough to see the project born. I’m glad she did get to hear—and adored—the first two songs.
As soon as I had rough demos of the first two songs, I brought them to her house. The surprise and delight on her face! Everybody knows siblingships are complex. Looking at your sib is sometimes like looking in a funhouse mirror of yourself. But both of you have been the most steadfast supporters of any and all of my creative efforts, and for that I am forever grateful. I hope I’ve been the same.
Absolutely, both to the support and the fun-house mirror of sisterhood. Someday we should do a piece on that! We have some stories to tell….
You can say that again! Hey, and by the way, Thank You! And, um, do you still have those earrings you borrowed?
The album is sublime. Thanks for introducing us to it!
"Looking at your sib is sometimes like looking in a funhouse mirror of yourself." : )