Artist: Jane Kramer
Hometown: Asheville, NC
Song: "Carnival of Hopes"
Album: Carnival of Hopes
Release Date: February 26
In Their Words: "I wrote 'Carnival of Hopes' when I was living on a little houseboat in the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon, and was missing the Blue Ridge Mountains and the life I lived there. The whole song stemmed from this one line that first popped into my head while I was taking the garbage out one evening:
'This morning there were two crows by the road / They were flying curiously close and swooping dangerously low / and I couldn't tell if they were lovers or if they were fighting foes …'
For me, it's a song about the moment you realize — truly and viscerally — that the love of your life did not last for your whole lifetime and that, although you know that you need to lay down your hammer and quit trying and give yourself over to that truth, your heart will always be looking up at the stars wondering if your person is seeing them in the burning way that you are, right at that moment. Even while you are in someone else's arms. It's a song about coming to grips with getting older and also with the fact that relationships — even the kind made of tattooed-on-your-bones-love — can be so bright and gaudy and beautiful and, most of all, fleeting; they're gone and taken down as quickly as they were built up, just like a carnival. — Jane Kramer
Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither
