Aisha Burns on the lure of the ocean

I was born in July of 1987. I am a water sign. My first name, Aisha, means “life” in Swahili. I met a woman a couple of years ago who shared my last name, and she told me that Burns means “of the water.” I know how much this will feel like a lie, but in truth, I had no knowledge of this when I named my first record Life in the Midwater.

It is spooky, almost.

I’ve always felt drawn to oceans, but growing up in central Texas, I was rarely near to its shore, save for one childhood family trip to the Gulf of Mexico. As a teenager, I dreamt of fleeing to either coast. The sea always seemed wild in a way beyond destruction and hypnotic beyond all articulation. The ocean, this thing, this mass, so strong and powerful it can rock and surge with immeasurable, unequal force and still remain elusive enough that one can not simply hold it in one’s hands.

When I set out to finish writing my newest record, Argonauta, I knew I wanted to be near it.

And so I settled in a small New England city, a ways north of Boston, just near Cape Ann. A short walk from my door put me at the mouth of the Atlantic, strong and mysterious as I ever imagined it could be. Just before this, I’d been given a book written by Anne Morrow Lindbergh called Gift From the Sea. In it, she documents her annual solitary retreat to a little house on the ocean where she’d stay for some time. She’d collect sea shells from her walk along the beach, take them back to her desk in the evenings, hold them in her hands and examine them. For each one she’d find some tie-in to human relationships and the general pulse of life. Her chapter called “Argonauta” is where my record takes its name, and it ends with this note:

“…each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid. And my shells? I can sweep them all into my pocket. They are only there to remind me that the sea recedes and returns eternally.”

And that is most dazzling thing to me about the sea. It is changing, is taken from, is pushed and prodded, and still it never loses its power. It is abused and it triumphs and it wrecks and it saves and brings joy and lifts our pain—and ever so gracefully, too. It takes no time to contemplate how to be. It simply is, through all of its shifts. And each shift is perfectly okay. I would love to be a little more this way.

When I’m are near it, whether simply gazing or submerged in it, there’s nothing so tangible left to describe it. I don’t mean the time I had, or the people who were there, or its temperature, or its depth, but just it. Above all else, when I walk away, there is only a feeling. That’s so much of how I think about music in general, and perhaps what I’ve been after in creating it. Every song I’ve ever written is born from a feeling. And I hope that’s what gets through at end of it all. I just want people to walk away having felt a little more deeply.

Of course, then there is my complicated past with the Atlantic. It is how my ancestors were carried here, to America, forcefully in ships from Africa, and thus carrying my latent pain. Yet, I see the Atlantic still as responsible for the only life I’ve ever known. How strange to love such an ocean that was a vessel for such hurt. It is still the metaphor for my relationship with my country and my relationship with my work in some ways, too. I am not gifted at sonically depicting sheer joy.

My songs tend to be born of complication, struggle. Working through conflict musically is cathartic in the end, but it is sometimes still laced with thorns that rise and fall. It is both a feeling of weightlessness while adrift and still the saltwater in your eyes. But the water, like humans, and music, is not always simple or rational. It can not be neatly boxed, and it is hard to make sense of. But still, ain't it force? And what a time you have trying to forget it.

And can you not say you have been changed by it?