Singer and songwriter Bethany Weimers has returned following a seven-year hiatus with the deeply poignant single ‘Circles’. This song contains multitudes of meaning derived from Weimers‘ deep reflection on life, brought about by motherhood first and then the covid-19 pandemic.
Before we dive further into the song, we’ll hear from the artist herself:
“Since becoming a mother at the end of 2018, I’ve often thought about the long line of mothers from which we are all born, and the line that stretches ahead of us into the future. How the egg that made my daughter was already in my body when I was born, and an egg that might make her future child is already inside her. Circles within circles. Then when the Pandemic happened I couldn’t help but reflect on my grandmother’s experiences growing up in the aftermath of a World War and a flu pandemic, and the challenging possibilities presenting my daughter’s generation. The world seemed to be in a state of shift and I found it both reassuring and equally terrifying to contemplate the cyclical nature of human behaviour stretching across time.”
The cyclical and inevitable nature of life and time as captured by the symbolic circle comes to the fore in repeated piano melodies and a hymnal chant of “we are circles.” When listening to the recording, you can’t help but to pivot your body to the ebb and flow of the composition, which pulls you in with its hypnotic quality. However, once Weimers‘ voice reaches its highest crescendo, we swap lyrics for innate vocal tones that are metallically warped and transformed into the backdrop for her poetic summary of history. She picks out the 1930s socialites “bright young things”, our current issue of global warming with “too hot outside” and the never-ending “making battles” urge that humans seem to possess. Irrelevant to the present, all these events occur in the same realm, in the same bright blue circle floating through space that we just so happen to call Earth.
Listen to the incredibly thought-provoking and sonically refined ‘Circles’ below and perhaps you’ll discover your own inert interpretation of what it means to be a circle inside a circle and so on.
You can also listen to ‘Circles’ in Folk This Way playlist.
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