Elexa Dawson’s “Speak Again” is a community effort

The path of inspiration which led to singer-songwriter Elexa Dawson‘s new single and video “Speak Again” is a winding one. Dawson’s song is an adaptation of a poem, “Nine Remain,” written by former Delaware governor Jack Markell, which was inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerrer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass.

Needless to say, this took some time.

“It started two years ago,” Dawson explains over Zoom. During shutdown, she got an email from Kimmerrer. Braiding Sweetgrass has been a huge success, albeit one a long time coming, as it made the New York Times bestseller list nearly a decade after its original publication, thanks to what Dawson calls “hand-to-hand, word-of-mouth popularity.”

In 2020, Jack Markell read the book and reflected on the chapter about Pottawatomie gatherings.

“We have a language conference and she had written about one year in particular,” continues Dawson. “At the time there were only nine Pottawatomie first-language speakers left. Now we have far fewer–like five or something like that. Jack wrote a poem and it was called ‘Nine Remain,’ and he reached out to Robin and wanted to find a Pottawatomie musician to work on this. And I said yes, as long as I was able to take my freedoms with it. He said that was fine.”

Dawson turned the “Nine Remain” poem into the “Speak Again” song and edited the context to be a little bit more hopeful and to not situate the Pottawatomie in the past.

“That’s a kind of a pet peeve of mine as a Native person: to always be sort of talked about in the past tense,” Dawson says. “My mission was to put some hope and some future into it.”

After the song was written and recorded, Dawson partnered with another indigenous artist named Nicole Emmons and applied for and received the Artist in Business Leadership Grant from First Peoples Fund.

“That was a year ago,” says Dawson. “So, we’ve been working on the video for a year now.”

That video, a masterpiece of emotionally moving stop-motion animation, premiered this past Friday, November 25–which was also Native American Heritage Day–at the L.A. Skins Fest in Hollywood.

This is not normally how Dawson works, however. Taking a poem that is based on a book and adapting it for her own musical voice is not the musician’s favorite way to write, she says: “I have always really been like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’ when people have handed me poems, but because of Heartland Song Network, I had taken at least one crack with a collaboration where someone handed me a poem and I was like, ‘I can do this.’”

That said, Dawson appreciates the freedom she had to change it up and to do what she felt needed to be done. As she puts it, plenty of time was spent with her just working with the words and making sure that it was saying something that she wanted it to. From there, it was a matter of recording “Speak Again” at Lost Cowgirl Records with longtime bassist Kelby Kimberlin, along with Lost Cowgirl’s Jenna Rae and Martin Farrell, Jr.

“K is playing electric bass, and then Jenna’s on the drums, and then Martin did all kinds of things on there,” explains Dawson. “That sweet guitar solo and there’s some really beautiful organ parts. Then I passed it up to Peter Oviatt at Moonflower Sounds for the mixing.”

Also in the mix are bells, which seem to nod to Pottawatomie jingle dresses, although Dawson says it’s more than that.

“Not just the dresses, but you know, you go to powwow and you just hear the guys all walking around with their big jingles and the girls, too, so I wanted the bells to be on there,” Dawsons says. “It’s also inspired by this really obscure track by a guy named Karl Blau called “Fallin’ Rain.” It has this light jingle in the back through the whole track, and it just carries you away. I was definitely inspired by that and robbed a little from that.”

For those keeping tabs, that means that we have a song, based on a poem, based on a book, recorded with collaborators and borrowing from another song. Let’s add in the final layer, which is the video she made with Nicole Emmons, allowing for a visual component to this ever-growing collaborative project.

“We worked very closely,” Dawson says of her work with Emmons. “I gave her full freedom, of course, to do what she wanted to do, as well, but when we initially talked, we just came up with some ideas of some concepts. She read out a storyboard and I loved it.”

From there, the pair worked really closely. Dawson was able to go down to Emmons’ studio and help her with some set building, getting to help paint the trees. Emmons also had help from some Pottawatomie ladies in a drum group down in Shawnee and FireLake, Oklahoma.

“They sewed these beautiful tiny clothes that the elder and the middle generation are wearing,” enthuses Dawson. “And then Leslie Deer, who’s an absolutely fantabulous Native designer, designed clothes and so, the future is so elaborate. This puppet is so beautifully adorned with this cool visor that she made.”

Dawson mentions that was one of the questions that she got to answer during the production process: “The kid is wearing the visor. Should we do that? Is it too weird?” to which she responds, “No, it’s perfect.”

“To me, it really communicates that weirdness that the younger generation is offering to the community that’s really required,” Dawson continues. “It’s like, ‘They’re wearing their weird little goggles’ or whatever, but they’re still part of the community, and they’re participating.”

The end result is that “Speak Again” is an amazing collaboration from start to finish. I make mention that it seems as though so many people wanted to be a part of this, and Dawson immediately concurs.

“I had a feeling it was gonna be that way at the beginning,” recalls the musician. “When Jack handed me the poem, I told him it would take me a while to do the music. Once I wrote the song, I was like, ‘This is gonna be a thing,’ and then when we recorded it and Jenna and Martin got done with it, I was like, ‘This is really good. We’ve really gotta do something with this.’ Each step of the way I told Jack, ‘It’s gonna take a while,’ because there has to be so many people involved.”

As Dawson puts it, anything that she was going to write which was inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerrer, she was going to “scrub it with a brush ’til it was shiny, because I think so highly of her and her work and anything I can do to amplify her and her work, I would absolutely love to do so. I told him it would take a while just because there were Indigenous people participating and we are on our own timeline, so that’s what we did and I’m really glad that we did.”