Alter Eco Travels

Hi folks. I’m hoping the rescheduled interview takes place as planned. Till then, I’m working on writing up a chat I had with new artist, Marie Digby, and planning an interview with another very cool vocalist who will remain unnamed till we actually nail the time slot and talk. Don’t want to lead you on…

Today it’s Toronto with rain. Lots and lots of rain, and fortunately as much cheer as precipitation.

Taking an Alter Eco chocolate break to meet Sarah McLachlan. (L to R) i4c's Ryan Park, Sarah & Me

Alter Eco and i4cCampaign are prepping for our interview with Sarah McLachlan today.

It’ll be a community event. We posted an invitation on Facebook and Twitter, asking people to submit their questions they would ask her. The questions are rolling in!

Community is a core focus for Sarah, so much so that she created an amazing festival of women music-makers and donates a dollar per ticket to a women’s organization in each city Lilith performs.

Alter Eco generates community through paying a fair price to the farmers’ co-ops it partners with and the outstanding products it brings to tables in the U.S. and Europe, exposing consumers to a new awareness of where food–and quality–comes from.

i4cCampaign brings Alter Eco together with ToGoWare, Better World Books and Grameen America with its support and visibility from the Lilith tour, and all of the AMAZING people we are meeting on the road. Ethical companies like ours will create a sustainable economy. Campaigns like i4c, of which we are happy to be a part, put fair trade,  positive environmental impact, and life at its best for all, right in the focal point of Lilith’s charitable giving and lasting investment.

We love Lilith. We’re so looking forward to saying thanks to Sarah in person, and bringing the community to her in our interview today.

Lilith is more than music to the ears

One of my favorite things out here on the road with Lilith are the stray comments I overhear. Most don’t get published or tweeted: some things remain sacred.

Others range around in my head on repeat. One of them was about a woman. The words I caught were that she was:

“…Complicated. But beautiful.”

This quote wormed round and round in my brain, my heart. I know I’m not alone as a woman when I say that somehow I got the message over a lifetime (messages?) that I’m too much, I’m not enough, I’m in the way, then not available…Complicated. Too complicated to take seriously, love, keep around. Pick your poison.

I heard, “but beautiful,” and those messages softened, as if my very woman-ness would forgive the “complicated” it presents. From a stray, overheard comment landing at just the right time, I felt let off the hook from having to be perfect, all the time conforming to other people’s standards of me or what a woman should be.

I’d wager to say most women know these voices in the head, or some version of them. In the end we hopefully realize they are not true.

Cultural climate change

“Complicated but beautiful” got me thinking about Lilith and its reemergence after its 11-year hiatus. Lilith media coverage has been less than desireable. The focus has been on flagging ticket sales, and questioning whether female artists need Lilith to get them taken seriously as musicians anymore.

It’s a complicated question. Thirteen years ago, Lilith was a phenomenon that shot through music culture like a breeze through a stuffy room. Everyone migrated to the open window that was Lilith, took in the view, breathed in the fresh air, and saw an entire horizon of new possibilities.

Thirteen years ago, though, was not the economic ice age we’re in now. Nor were there female musicians playing back to back on the radio, let alone on stage.

It’s a new climate. So I’d like to suggest to anyone listening a new set of possibilities, and maybe some different measures of success than low ticket sales in a summer where even bread sales are low.

To borrow from another comment I overheard on the road:

“You can’t always be right. You can, however, make a difference.”

Lilith is a beautiful thing. Without exception, every artist that stands on the stage expresses her excitement at being able to play at Lilith. They each talk about the fun they have playing music—their love and livelihood—together and for this excited crowd, the ease and sisterhood, the learning from each other, and the opportunity these stages provide them. From that context comes this incredible feel-good, can-do-anything vibe to rock OUT on stage.

And rock out they do. In the audience, there are young girls going home with visions of music in their futures. There are giddy concert-goers lit up by new artists they never would have heard had they not come to see their favorite on the bill.

In the village for the pre-shows, there are women and men vibing to new music and the community visibility Lilith brings to campaigns like “i4c a better tomorrow,” The Neufeld Institute, and local charities that receive $1 of ticket sales.

Thanks in part to Lilith past, female artists have made strides that make naysayers doubt the contemporary viability of “A Celebration of Women in Music.” Concert tours across the nation are hit by the reality of a recession no one planned for. But what remains is the music, these kickass crazy good performances pulling together a community of music lovers for a day in each city it sets up.

Last weekend, I got asked to cover Lilith for a broader audience than I expected to reach from my cozy booth at Alter Eco. Like the stage artists all express, it’s an excitement and an honor, a welcome and scary opportunity. Broader visibility means exposure to more potential judgment. But my core purpose is there: to ask questions and bring Lilith to the public with my love and livelihood, the writing.

On the same day I got asked to cover more for Lilith, I was walking through the village at the L.A. show when I overheard a guy talking to his girlfriend. He floated by just long enough for me to hear:

“That’s how you have to ask. Like you’re beautiful on the inside.”

Negative rumblings have missed the soul and spirit of Lilith…the music, the talent, and the community that is here.  But the soul and celebration can be found on the inside, when you walk in the gates…on the stages, in the village, in the crowd.

The audiences may be smaller this year. Lilith may be faced with a new set of challenges that didn’t exist 13 years ago. Yet it’s still giving the goodness it always had. That’s complicated. But beautiful.



Congratulations to Amy Wise Bacis of San Diego! She’s the winner of a year of fair trade chocolate bars from Alter Eco. Oh, the sweet possibility of it all.

Check out her FB page to glean some of her glee.

http://www.facebook.com/amywisebacisphotography

CONGRATS AMY!

For those of you who are sad Amy is far away from your city and cannot share her chocolate loot with you, dry those eyes. We’re starting another contest today!

Go to our AlterEcoSF page on Facebook and share why  YOU should be the lucky winner of a year of free chocolate. You can also enter by tweeting the same, and RT’ing your tweet (@AlterEcoSF).

If you’re not in the Tweet + FB parade, comment here and we’ll throw your hat in the ring.

Sweet luck to you, my chocolate-loving friends!

There are many tales, actually. Here are a few shots that tell their own stories.

Jenn's tattoo - Calgary, show 1

Antoine, Vancouver, Show 3

i4c dinner, Vancouver, show 3

Ana Amman of Oregon Music News, Portland, show 4

Pretty Abbey watching the Gorge show, Washington, show 5

Friends, Kim & Jackie making stove s'mores for July 4, San Francisco, Show 6

Crowd on its feet for Heart, San Francisco show 6

Alter Eco's Brandi Carlile-inspired Kate, San Diego show 7

Could you say no to chocolate from this face? Kara, L.A., show 9

Taking the village stage with Annie, L.A., show 9

i4c Girls, L.A., show 9

Shanna on bus in Arizona, en route to Santa Fe, pre-show 10 in Colorado

Stop lights and night sky, day off in Santa Fe, pre- show 10 in Colorado

We love chocolate. You love chocolate. Esp winning a year free of it.

Alter Eco is giving away a year’s worth of chocolate. (Yum!) Enter to win by commenting below by Sunday, July 11. We’ll draw the winner then and announce it here.

Sweet luck!

Acopagro Cooperative – Cacao + Reforestation Program in Amazon Peru

Lilith takes on San Diego today, my hometown. Being here has got me thinking about family. My grandma, affectionately known as Gramcracker, is 99 and still very much the matriarch of her brood. I think of her sometimes when I marvel at the family’s work ethic. We’re all really good at passing up fun when the cotton is high. She didn’t retire from her job until she was 76.

This gets me thinking of the many conversations I’ve had on tour, with people whose families work in the same business.

My cabbie in Vancouver, told me everyone in his family drives a taxi, his brothers, his sister, his cousins. They all work for the same company and get the uber-inside scoop when they team up.

Our head of tour security has siblings in two different cities who run the security at major event venues.

In my family, just about everyone in works in construction or design.

And in each night’s Lilith finale there are a couple of young daughters singing on stage in front of thousands, audiences and music blooming in their blood.

Bolivia Quinoa farmers – Anapqui Cooperative in Altiplano, Bolivia

I wake up in the morning to help put together the Alter Eco booth, and begin to think about the families of farmers who have produced the reason I’m here: the black, red and white rices I’m setting out, the colorful quinoas and bags of sugar. The chocolate. Oh, the chocolate. It occurs to me that growing products and selling them for a fair market value is also a family affair. It feeds families–on the farm and across oceans, it connects those that are working together, it strengthens the co-ops, and the integrity of the work continues down the family line. …Like the designers in my family and the singers in Lilith’s.

It’s an intense life on the road, I’m discovering, this my first time out. But this notion of family settles in, the way we work together and what we produce for ourselves and other families, essentially. It makes me hold a bag of Alter Eco grain or offer a piece of chocolate or watch from the audience those young girls singing their socks off, and family brings it all home.

Grams in Action, 07/06/10

We made it to Washington for Lilith at the Gorge. It was all divine, sunshine wonderment. Wanna see?

Sarah McLachlan and Mathieu Senard, co-founder of Alter Eco, at Portland’s Lilith!

Sarah & Mat Smile Over Fair Trade Chocolate

Get together every night and sing the same sets, you’d wonder if it gets boring…to do it…to hear it…But it never does. It’s brilliant. And soulful. And unique. The fans, the stars, the songs, the moods, the mistakes and the recoveries. Mix of magic. And different every night.