We'll Meet That Day

from A Body is a Delicate House by Jeni Hankins

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    With touring an impossibility during lockdown, Jeni brimmed with songs. "A Body is A Delicate House" is her studio album from the lockdown period – first released as a hand-pressed CD in fall of 2021. After a successful limited pressing, she had the album remastered by Martin Stansbury of Cacophony Cottage Studios and factory pressed in 2022.

    In this release and in her other lockdown release "I Fell Into the Fire," she returns to Jewell Ridge for stories as well as finding inspiration in the life of her late music mentor, Norman Cross.

    The physical CD comes with a 46-page booklet complete with essays, liner notes, lyrics, and collages made by Jeni by hand.

    From the conclusion to Jeni's liner notes:

    "Every little thing I’ve done in my terrestrial life has pointed me toward this calling – to watch and note, to report back, to listen for broadcasts from the spirit and from those who have crossed to the other side. My delicate house has an antenna which is always switched on for particular messages. This has always been my way. It’s just how I was made in the same way that I always woosh into a chair without calculating the risk, in the same way that I have one squinty eye like Dad, like Grandaddy, the newspaper men, the reporters.

    These songs are my reading and translation of what I’ve heard in the recent worldwide news from the firmament and the spirit. Bless those who whisper these messages and the celestial currents that carry them.

    There’ll be loaves, there’ll be fishes
    – the answer in your hands.
    And you’ll tell it all to me
    when you reach the promise land.
    Amen, Dad. Amen."

    Includes unlimited streaming of A Body is a Delicate House via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.     ... more
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  • Full Digital Discography

    26
    releases

    Get all 26 Jeni Hankins releases available on Bandcamp and save 20%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of String Unraveller Demo May 2021, The American Dream (Harlis and Freda), Voice Memo Demo, I'm Letting Go of You – Kitchen Single, The Wondarium: Songs For Kids, A Body is a Delicate House, I Fell Into the Fire, The Loneliest Snowman, I Fell Into The Fire – Limited Edition Handprinted, and 18 more. , and , .

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about

My friend and collaborator Alfred John Hickling and I were exchanging lyrics and melodies back and forth by email during the coronavirus lockdown in England in early February 2021. I had finished a lyric I started in January about snow and Alfred sent me two possible melody and mood ideas for the snow song.

I chose a minor key feel on banjo for the snow song, but this other guitar-based melody reminded me of a Carter family style song. So, I was inspired to write lyrics for it. I had been thinking a lot about my Dad (my Dad passed away in July of 2016) because Valentine's Day was coming up and Mom and Dad got married on Valentine's Day. For our family of four, Valentine's Day was more of an all around family holiday where we celebrated our adventure as children of really young parents and the love we all shared.

I also had Mawmaw Margie on my mind in early February. Her birthday is the fourth of February and she died back in 1991 on the 23rd of February. So, this year she will have been gone for thirty years. That hardly seems possible because she is so present in my life – in the way my hands look, in my feistiness, and in the crimp in my hair. Mawmaw Margie was a real character who wore polyester slacks and was always laughing when she wasn't cross. I liked to sit on her kitchen countertop and eat bowls of cereal with my special spoon in my special bowl. She always seemed to be washing dishes or hanging out laundry on the line. She kept our dog Snooker's gall stones in a jar in her buffet sideboard. Her hair was always in curlers covered by a hair net. She always seemed to be preparing for an occasion that never came.

So many people are grieving after a year of coronavirus and many people will be living with the memories of people they loved, wondering how to keep going without the physical presence of a particular someone in their life. Perhaps like you, I feel all of the ways a person is still present in that strangely fleeting, but sometimes very powerful way that people are both mortal and immortal.

lyrics

We’ll Meet That Day

I remember the day we said goodbye.
I never thought you’d go.
I guess I hoped you’d live forever
just cause I wished it so.

You always told me
no body could hold me –
the spirit is where reside, deep inside me.
So, that’s where I’ll seek you
and I still believe
we’ll meet that day in the sky.

You used to sing ‘bout that lonesome valley –
the one that we walk all alone.
But I’ll always have a true companion
in the wisdom I learned in our home.

I climbed the path up to our mountain,
brought flowers to your grave.
I knew you spoke in the trees around me.
You’d rolled the stone away.

credits

from A Body is a Delicate House, released December 13, 2022
Words by Jeni Hankins, Lulu Wall Music, BMI. Music by Jeni Hankins and Alfred John Hickling.

Jeni Hankins – Vocals
Alfred John Hickling – Harmony Vocals and all instruments

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Jeni Hankins London, UK

Jeni Hankins grew up in the coalfields of Appalachian in Southwest Virginia among a family of miners, moonshiners, and journalists. Her writing pulls the grit, gumption, and keen sense of observation out of that heritage like drawing water from her grandmother’s well.

In every song, Jeni’s “true sense of place shines through – old as the hills, but brand new at the same time.” ... more

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