The heel that has crushed me

Our dear fan Alex wrote recently of his interest in learning the origin of our name. The short answer is that it came out of my enduring obsession with word, symbol, meaning, energy, and color.

The long answer is that it started with a childhood love of all things purple. Most of my outfits featured some shade of it. It was royalty and eccentricity, defiance and gorgeousness. Grape juice was sensational. The blueberries in the muffins were beautiful and delicious. The invitations to most of my solar return celebrations (birthdays) were purple. The Color Purple will make you cry. It's a magical, transmutative color. J. Mascis noted this alchemical quality when he declared that purple amps just sound better, and he's right, especially if it's a purple Vox. This color and I have a lot of history. At times, though, I have put purple on hold to experiment with other colors, but I always come back eventually.

Luke said that choosing a name would naturally be my responsibility. Initially, when pressed to find one, I got lost in my anger over the fact that I had to label my past, present, and future endeavors in a clever fashion that hinted at our flavor. As an art-for-art's sake gal, I wasn't eager to negotiate the intersection of our sacred art with the commerce outside. I wished I were a solo project, so I could just be my name. Then I started asking Luke questions. What is our intention? How do we feel? Why are we doing this? We aimed to create music of emotional authenticity and power in such a way that could offer catharsis and accelerate healing in its listeners.

At the time, I was deeply involved in natural healing modalities and spirituality, so I decided to thumb through some of my books, spending considerably more time on one by Hildegard von Bingen. The medieval abbess had been an inspiration to me since I first learned of her work as a healer, composer, poet, scientist, philosopher, and visionary (this is the abbreviated list, if you can believe it.) According to her, violets could check the melancholy of anyone oppressed with a sad mind, making them happy and making their breathing healthy. Ah, I liked it!

Violet. "The sky was all violet," and there was that "ocean of violets in bloom." Prince clearly digs purple, and Courtney Love must have an appreciation for it, but Frank Black's interest in the shade is quite serious, as his "Violet" is entirely devoted to fleshing out various aspects of its awesomeness, not least among them its role as the representative color of the crown chakra. This is the point at the top of your head that aligns you with divine guidance. A cool color, literally and beyond. A lovely fit.

So I had violet, but I needed a mode of presentation. In an interview, Sarah McLachlan referred to her songs as little rooms. A neat idea. Little rooms are basically boxes, I thought. Box. There's the larynx, the voice box, that houses the vocal cords. There's also the miniature room in your mouth, a tiny church with the sweeping palatopharyngeal arch as its ceiling that helps produce vocal tone. For my inner social critic, however, box was not just the song, the room, or the voice, but it was also a means of delivering a commodity to the world. Many modern items seem to arrive in a box. Why not us? Thus, box married violet. A divinely inspired mode of communication meant to serve the emotional transformation of its listeners. The name resonated with me, and the other bandmates thought it was swell. Not surprisingly, violet boxes had been around me the whole time. I found that, when observing my primary musical spaces, there they were. I wrote in my bedroom between violet walls, I sang on the freeway in my violet car, and, in our rehearsal space, a square of violet-painted wood was on the wall. It wasn't our decoration; it had been hanging there since we started renting, but I hadn't noticed.

That was a really long answer. Are you sorry you asked, Alex?

I'll close with the words of Mark Twain: "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it." A lot of our songs have that crushed element, but, increasingly, they are searching for a means to forgive, and, more and more, we are becoming the sweetness that is gleaned from the various glorious messes that have been made.