White Fire by Lainie Fefferman

White Fire is my one-woman-band feminist Torah commentary.

These songs are my own entrance into the practice of Midrash: the rich and wild Jewish tradition of interpreting and retelling Hebrew Bible stories through modern lenses. These accounts have traditionally excluded women authors, but over the last handful of decades, women have been getting in on the game! I chose to do my first midrashim as imagined first-person retellings of the stories surrounding different foundational female characters of the Jewish people – women who are at the centers of amazing stories, but who are given so little actual real estate in the sacred texts. To enlarge and enrich the space their existence could inhabit in my life, I asked myself questions about them: "what was Dinah thinking when her brother slaughtered her lover and all the men of his kingdom?" or "how did Miriam feel when she saved her entire tribe from dying of thirst in the desert?" or "why would a teenage Rebecca leave her entire family behind to go off and marry her first cousin?" Instead of telling you how I answered these questions, I invite you to give this album a listen and let me know what you think!

As for the nuts and bolts of these five songs, there are a couple of plain vanilla sine tones that creep on in from time to time, but almost all of what you’ll hear was recorded with various kinds of mics with various levels of care in and around my Brooklyn apartment. I recorded my vocals in the closet, at the dinner table, and under a blanket while my beloved husband slept sweetly on the other side of the room. I found so much delight in making digital drum racks out of recordings of newspaper boxes, squeaky doors, a burp, and the switches of my old Ikea lamp. My compositional juice these days comes largely in the form of plug-in choices and automation curves, and I followed no rules in making these tracks except my own curiosities and intuitions. I hope you enjoy!

Lainie is a music maker, teacher, organizer, and general proponent of new and forward-thinking music. She loves very loud music, very quiet music, very focused music, very scattered music, and very idiosyncratic music. She wants to hear your music.

lainiefefferman.com