Eleanor Brown - Dig Where You Stand (2025)

Tracklist

01. Medicine
02. For This Is Soul
03. The Reckoning
04. All In The Mystery
05. Holding On
06. Polarised (so light your fires)
07. Dig Where You Stand
08. We Must Keep Our Spirit
09. Cross The River
10. Giving Our All

This is an album about hope, holding on and digging deep. The working title has been ‘hold on songs’ because most tracks have that sentiment running through them. It's an album about survival, and I know that my music resonates most with others who are doing just that.

The songs have been written between 2018 – 2023. Some of them were born the same time as the songs that made up my 2020 album All In The End Is Harvest and the rest in the years that followed. I see these two albums making a whole together and completing a record of this time. A combination of a very individual journey but also a prayer for the collective.

‘Dig Where You Stand’ has been a phrase that’s reverberated around me since I moved to live and work ‘on the land’ in 2012. It was first shared with me by my friend Tom and then by reading Alistair McIntosh’s book Soil and Soul. He writes that we must start where we stand but that if we dig deep enough we find ourselves connected to everything else.

Following the thread back further it connects to Swedish author Sven Lindqvist’s 1978 book Gräv där du står - translated as 'dig where you stand'. The central idea underpinning his book is that doing history work is a necessary and significant contributory factor in achieving social, political and industrial change, and indeed in fashioning a new world. His motto was drawn from Nietzsche who wrote Wo du stehst, grab tief hinein!’ - where you stand, dig deep!

I’ve rendered these concepts into my own digging. As the saying goes, the personal is political. We can only start with ourselves and where we are. This collection of songs is really an ode to a period of time in my life where I committed myself to stay in one place and dig deep. When it was very, very hard to keep going. Both a deep inner journey at the same time as an outer challenge of what it means to grow food and live on a particular piece of land.

One of my favourite quotes comes from Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti in his book Commentaries on Living who states ‘it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society’. In this light, I’ve been asking myself the question - what is medicine?

The only truth I really know is that life wants to grow and life always pushes up through the cracks. The songs speak of the sweet mystery we can only savour once we have sat in darkness. These are songs of resilience and a call to keep on keeping on. Of staying true to ourselves in the reckoning of every day. Holding on together, growing together, questioning the seeds we are sowing and the soil we are planting them into and what we are tending in this life and for future generations.

My hope is for these songs to be of comfort and support during the challenging days we live. A call to stay with the heart amongst the polarisations of these times and to be the medicine that we need.

To be honest, all my songs and albums are banging on about this same ol’ theme so there is no beginning or end to this album, just a record of a certain time and some movement in a spiral that keeps on spinning.

I truly hope you get something from it and I hope it spreads where it needs to go.

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