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How Do We Call This Home

from Yellow Blue Alizarin by Melanie Ida Chopko

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  • 7-inch Watercolor Print & Album Card
    Poster/Print + Digital Album

    Beauty to hold in your hands while you listen: a 7-inch giclée watercolor print and album card with lyrics and drawings. I was so happy to ditch the internet and work alongside my people at the Compound Gallery, the wonderful Eric Sanchez of Daruma Press and designer Chloë Dalby. We created and hand cut a limited edition of 100 prints, with the first set going to my beloved funders.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Yellow Blue Alizarin via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • Album Card
    Poster/Print + Digital Album

    The album card, each with a unique outtake from the glicée printing process with Daruma Press. Featuring lyrics, profound gratitude, and a drawing by myself. Designed by Chloë Dalby.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Yellow Blue Alizarin via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

about

For Bismillah, from Afghanistan.

lyrics

After all of that
After cardamom and crushed tomatoes
We drew like children on your kitchen tile
You taught me how to paint your skin
Yellow, blue, alizarin
Sometimes I'd make you crack a smile

After years of that
When they flew you back across the mountains
You just a painter helping Yankee soldiers
With fourteen vaccines in your arms
So your home would do no harm
I still see them in your shoulders

Do you call this home
A city with no seasons
Do you call it home
As my country for no reason
Clutches yours with endless wars
How do we call this home

After hearing that
This place unfolded into something sweeter
Deserts blossomed into words of Rumi
An inconvenient place to be
Between Russia and the sea
You told to me the history

I can't call this home
A city with no seasons
I can't call it home
As my country for no reason
Clutches yours with endless wars

How do you call this home
A city with no seasons
I can't call it home
As my country for no reason
Clutches yours with senseless wars
How we call this home

All those years
An empty place to me
All those columns
I never had to read
Lay me down
My belly to my feet
Oh your red rug felt like home
I want a place like home

credits

from Yellow Blue Alizarin, released September 27, 2016

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all rights reserved

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about

Melanie Ida Chopko Asheville, North Carolina

Songwriter Melanie Ida Chopko writes “little jewels,” exploring our relationship to the natural world and to one another. Her songs are as interested in the world around her as the one within herself, lush in melody, lyric and arrangement. If Joni Mitchell, Sufjan Stevens, and Ben Folds were neighbors and made music on Sundays, it might sound like this. ... more

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