In the Land of Milk and Honey with
Eliza Gilkyson
by Richard Cuccaro
 Photo: Warren Churgin

Her voice rides in on a sigh over waves of notes sliding over steel strings. 
It's a steely whisper, singing of yearnings and the heart it takes to deal with them. 
There's a slight twang, hinting at homespun country sensiblity. 

I am a one man woman / I live one day at a time / I keep one eye open / 
I got a one track mind / I am a one-trick pony livin' in a one-horse town /
 People say I should be lonely / but that ain't what's goin' down
 / I'm alone, but not lonely

Austin Texas's Eliza Gilkyson is a gifted songwriter and storyteller. Her songs of relationships 
are stunning in their naked portrayal of her battles with her pain and need. In a recent feature article,
The Austin Chronicle called her "The Lioness in Winter." It's an apt title for her. 
A tall, elegant woman with blond, spiky hair she exudes intelligence and a breezy sense of humor. 
Only a man with dulled senses would not feel his heart skip a beat.  Beyond the heat of her personal 
revelations, she possesses a fiery global vision that enables her to light big bonfires under big issues… 
like the current political situation.
"Hiway 9," a highway in Iraq, is also the name of the first track on her latest CD, Land of Milk and Honey (2004). 
It's a blockbuster of a song that, on the surface is very deceptive. It's lazy, loping swingy sound leads 
some listeners (like me) to let it slip by, like watching a pretty stream, missing the sharp rocks underneath. 
I finally sat and read the words and their perfect encapsulation of the present mess hit like a semi 
(scrape me off the bathroom floor). Here are a few lyrics:

Well the white god said to the little man/ 
we're gonna fulfill scripture in the holy land / 
between the Tigris and Euphrates it's a lot like hell / 
go on and liberate my people and their O-I-L …
So the little man gathered all his chickenhawks in / 
and the neocons and his daddy's kin / 
they had their own clear channel and a hell of a spin / 
and a white man hidden in a black man's skin.

Ahem… Are you listening Colin Powell? Nice performance at the U.N. And, by the way, isn't that your son, 
Michael, playing Three-Card-Monte with the FCC regulations? A "Clear Channel" to the right!
She told me: "It was sparked by the time that three families lost their lives at a checkpoint on Hiway 9 
because they couldn't understand English. They were told to stop, but they kept on going because they 
were scared and they were all shot to death. I wrote it in a couple of days. Then I had to refine it over and over. 
Most of my songs start out quickly but then the refining takes days and days. I tried to get the words to be 
as economical as possible. I didn't want a single wasted word in there. Every word had to have the right meaning. 
The song expresses what a lot of people are feeling right now. I wasn't sure if it was a good idea to lead off 
the album with it. I thought about it and decided that it was too important, that I had to get it out there. 
It wasn't as if I was going to lose any commercial airplay. They weren't playing my stuff anyway.  We've had  
a real buzz going on with non-commercial radio, so it's been great."
Eliza agrees about the song's surface deceptiveness. "It sounds like a trucker's song," she says. "People listen, 
then halfway through say, 'Hey… wait a minute.' I don't always explain where it is. I don't like to lay everything 
out at shows. I find that playing it later in the show makes it easier for the audience to get it. Initially, they're just 
checking the artist out, getting the feel for things.
At a festival in Oregon, they didn't get it 'til about halfway through and by the end they were just freaking out 
and they wanted me to sing it again. They made me sing it four times that weekend. Each time they got it even 
better. Now people just clap when I start it. In England, I got booed at one show a year ago. Most people were 
very quiet. And paranoid. This year they were openly supportive."
"Tender Mercies," from the same CD, deals with the tragedies that unfold in foreign places that many in the U.S. 
either ignore or minimize. Eliza looks at the devastation of families torn apart from a mother's point of view. 
"In America, we can be arrogant in thinking that the loss of our children in war is more important or more 
devastating. It's the same everywhere." The cover of Land of Milk and Honey shows a young boy diving into 
a pool. Eliza  says, "It's a photograph taken in Kosovo, Albania by friend of mine who's a photographer for 
Newsweek. I felt so bad for the mother of that child. It was so hot that day and he was trying to cool off. 
He was jumping into a toxic dump site. It made me think of what mothers want for their children. 
This is completely what Land of Milk and Honey is all about. It's the fantasy of blithe ignorance versus the 
reality of what we're living with today."  She sings:
Across the world she tapes explosives to her chest / steps into a shopping mall / a life devoid of all of mercy's 
tenderness / really isn't any life at all / Down below the factory along the riverside / children swimming in a 
poison pool / playful afternoon of unintended suicide / gone before they ever even knew…

Photo: Warren Churgin

Out of Childhood: Creating a Self
Eliza Gilkyson's father was Terry Gilkyson of the Easy Riders. In my adolescence, I listened to his 
folk hits "Marianne" ("All day, all night, Marianne") and "Greenfields," sung by The Brothers Four, 
on radio. I only recently learned, while writing this article, that he had written "Memories are Made of This," 
a song popularized by Dean Martin that I was very fond of. I also hadn't a clue that he received an 
Academy Award nomination for writing "The Bear Necessities" for the motion picture The Jungle Book 
in 1968. 
As a child, Eliza was painfully shy. Things opened up for her when she reached adolescence. She says, 
"When I was around 12 or 13, I picked up the guitar. My sister Nancy and I got lessons from one of 
the guys in Easy Riders when I was about 14 years old. We formed a band, calling it 'Lisa and Nancy.' 
My knickname was 'Lisa' - I didn't reclaim 'Eliza' for myself until much later. We did all the usual folk 
songs. I think I got a voice when I was about 13. My father was immediately cognizant that he could use 
me for demos. In return for background vocals, he would trade studio time for me to do my own stuff. 
I would get about 1 hour at the end of sessions. That was sort of my pay. I was so comfortable in the studio. 
I've always been comfortable there. I've been doing it for a long time."
A quote from Eliza's web site bio states thet she got into music "for all the wrong reasons." She explains: 
"I was an angst-filled child, very shy and 'peripheral.' I wasn't very confident. I recognized that music 
was going to be a way to create a persona of confidence. I saw that there was a power there. I thought 
of it as a way to be noticed. I created a bigger than life persona. I had to spend years to find out who I 
really was."
Her relationship with her father was complex. He apparently had a dark side and wasn't easy to get close to. 
His on-line bio states: "While visiting his daughter Eliza in Austin, Texas, in 1999, Terry died from natural 
causes. In the CD Lost and Found released in 2002, over an ominous but tender and compelling melody, 
in the song "Easy Rider," she sings:

Now I miss the talking sweet and sad / 
I miss the love that we almost had / 
I know the devil drove my father / 
but the lord got daddy / 
Farther along, easy rider / 
we'll understand it by and by / 
Farther along, easy rider…

Her parents divorced when she was 14. She call it "a great tragedy." One of the stories she tells in concerts is 
how her father drove back and forth to work each day to an office to sit down at a desk and write songs 
each day. He'd hoped to fool her mother that he was just an ordinary guy doing a regular job, but 
"she found him out." While he was devoted to his family and children, practically cutting out all touring, 
there were aspects to the music business and his personality that just didn't fit into the marriage.

The Hippie Years
As Eliza got older, she continued on with her music and moved to New Mexico. She says, 
"I got married and had a family in the 60's. I was a hippie mom, very nomadic, living with 
musicians. Her first band, during the 70's was called The Ark Band. She continued to make 
recordings and increased her fan base, but major success eluded her. An album, Pilgrims, released 
on Gold Castle Records in 1987 was her most successful record, but gave her a reputation as a 
new-age artist due to its atmospheric nature.  She says, "I couldn't get anything going in the States. 
I couldn't get a record deal" 


The Vollenwieder Connection
In  1991 she received an offer to work in Europe with Swiss composer/harpist Andreas Vollenweider 
and accepted. He'd been looking for a "Diva" to record with, to augment his instrumental work 
with vocals. He looked all over Europe, but then turned to the U.S. His manager knew Eliza's manager 
and thought Eliza would be a good candidate. He thought, however, that she wouldn't be interested, 
and asked if her manager knew someone like her. It turned out that Eliza was ready for a change and 
was available, so she met Andreas to audition. She remembers: "I flew to Zurich and he picked me up 
at the airport. The airline had lost my guitar.  I said 'Oh well, they'll find it, let's go. They can just deliver it.' 
He said later on that he had already decided that I had the job because I didn't freak out about losing 
my guitar. The fact that I was not the type to panic seemed more important than whether or not I was any good!" 
She laughs at the memory. After two years of working with Vollenwieder, travelling back and forth, 
the resulting album, Eolian Minstrel was released in 1993. She then released a CD of her  own, with a 
Vollenweider-like title Through the Looking Glass in 1996. That was followed by Redemption Road in 1997. 
With the use of synthesizers and her slow evolution from her hippie outlook, the new-age tag stuck to her until 
she released Misfits in 1999. She then began regaining stature as the formidable singer/songwriter that she is. 
Her breakthrough CD was Hard Times in Babylon released in 2000, her first album on the Red House label. 
This was followed by Lost and Found in 2002. These two high-quality forerunners to her current exceptional 
CD are a foundation for an ascendant career. Red House included her on its Dylan tribute Nod to Bob album 
in 2001. Her cover of "Love Minus Zero No Limit" is one of my two favorites on the CD 
(the other is "All Along the Watchtower" done by The Paperboys). On Going Driftless, Red House's 2002 
compilation tribute to Greg Brown, Eliza's version of "Sleeper" stands very tall next to renditions of other 
Brown songs by artists like Lucinda Willams, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lucy Kaplansky and Shawn Colvin. 
She is certainly a peer. The acknowledgement will get here.

The Hunger
It's apropos that Eliza covered relationship songs by Brown and Dylan. Dealing with the addiction of need, 
there may be others as good at expressing it but there's no one better.
On "Twisted," in Hard Times in Babylon, she sings:

I like your clever boy disguises, your shady little grin  
when you walk the ragged edges of the outside looking in  
you're an exotic, you're in demand 
you're everything I've wanted in a man
I'm fucked up, so twisted
you're everything I've wanted in a man

On "Flatline," on the same CD:

O' the exquisite agony of withdrawal, 
it feels like some kind of voodoo curse  
push me full of pins, baby, or pull 'em out 
I can't tell you which one is worse

The highs and the lows are all there. In Lost and Found, on "Mama's Got a Boyfriend," 
she sings in her best sultry manner:

Mama's got a best friend 
Soul Connection 
Love injection 
Feels like a pretty good thing

And then on "Fall Into the Night," there's:

Baby take your blue jeans off / 
lay your body down / 
Leave the windows open 
let the night blow us around…

When the romance flies off and the blues roll in, then slowly subside, 
she rocks out on "Welcome Back:" 

I was bent but I was not broken
I was sinking but I did not drown
I was reeling but I was still hoping
I could still be lost and found

Her take on it runs like this: "We're so driven by a sense of longing that is placated 
by relationship. A sense of longing is sort of the human condition. We do all kinds 
of things to anesthesize our selves or avoid the feeling of longing. Relationships are 
a very comfortable way to placate that feeling. My realization over the years has been 
that longing is actually a life force. It's the driving force behind creativity. I think that's 
why people are very creative when they're alone. Regarding her song, "Alone, But Not Lonely," 
she says, "It's a hard-won place to get with yourself. I don't want to come across that I know 
some great universal truth that everybody should know… only 'this is what I noticed about 
my own experience.' I tried to put it in a way that's universal… finally I don't need someone 
to complete me. It's a process getting to that point. Take responsibility for your own experience 
and don't expect something outside you to satisfy you."

A Woman's Saga
"The Ballad of Yvonne Johnson" on her current CD embraces the issue of women's rights. 
Eliza came across Stolen Life the autobiography of Yvonne Johnson, an imprisoned Canadian 
Cree woman. She says, "I picked up the book in a Canadian Airport, and was blown away. 
Yvonne's been in jail since she was 27. She's 42 now." The song encapulates a saga of redemption 
in a life lived under horrific circumstances. 
In jail for killing a man who was about to lure her children away from her, Yvonne is credited 
as a co-writer. There are some verses that Yvonne has re-written, that will be on a future album. 
Some lyrics:

First memory of my brother Leon, I was only three
He threw me on the table, forced his way inside of me
All the kids stood around as I descended into hell
When I told my daddy 'bout it,
he had his way as well, boys, he had his way as well

Eliza's sense of connection to the women's community comes across in this statement on The Austin Chrionicle 
web site: "Abuse, incest, rape; for women they're so prevalent that it's best to go ahead and bring it out to the 
collective, so that we may cry for these people, because there isn't any amount of tears they can cry that will 
ever heal them enough. If the collective can cry with them, I honestly think they have a shot at a better life."
The Lioness is reaching out to the Northeast. Eliza's tour intinerary is bringing her our way more and more. 
Let's give her the embrace she deserves!

Web site: www.elizagilkyson.com
Upcoming Area Shows:
Oct 1   Outpost in the Burbs, 40 S. Fullerton, Montclair, NJ   973-744-6560
Dec 1   Watercolor Cafe,  2094 Boston Post Road,   Larchmont, NY    914-834-2213
Dec 4   Norwich Arts Center, 60-62 Broadway, Norwich, CT