Cotton Candy Trees

Song Breakdown | Psychedelics and Trick Mirrors

photography Alexis Townsend | layout + design Catriana van Rijn | cloud design + layout Sleepless Mindz

I first learned about the use of psychedelics to treat mental health diagnoses when someone close to me started microdosing to relieve their depression.

To try and reorient my brain away from the smattering of my confused knowledge and associations with psychedelics—Grateful Dead, beat poets, the war on drugs, black lit posters of Jim Morrison, the Cheshire Cat, cartoon characters with spinning saucers for eyes—I started reading.

The checkered, and misunderstood history of psychedelics is a fascinating look at developments in neuroscience, ideas of “universal love,” military torture, fungal networks, and for me, artistic imagery. 

Through essays, articles, and personal accounts, what comes up again and again is the equating of “ego death” with a greater capacity for love.

Speaking to the phenomenological effects that people on psychedelics report, author Michael Pollan states in How to Change Your Mind, that “the dissolution of ego seems to me by far the most important and the most therapeutic.”

When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently. p.390

I wanted to conjure some of that feeling and sentiment in a song.

I wanted to use psychedelic imagery to try and create a picture of what discovery, wonder, and love look and feel like to me.

TRICK MIRROR

This phrase in the latter half of the song comes from a book of essays of the same title by New Yorker staff writer, Jia Tolentino.

…a stranger tweeted an excerpt of a Jezebel piece I wrote in 2015, highlighting a sentence about what women seemed to want from feminist websites—a “trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault.” …I had not understood, when I was writing that Jezebel piece, that that line was also an explanation for something more personal.

I think many of us keep a “trick mirror” in our back pocket—a travel-size one that keeps us satisfied (unsatisfied) until we can get home and magnify things in greater detail in the full-length, alone in our bedroom.

At various points in the day, we might sneak furtive glances into its glass to admire how beautiful we are, how proud of ourselves we might feel in a moment, how lucky we are to be alive in this body, in this moment, in this soul, with these friends; and then, just as quickly, with a trick of the light, see that same reflection as suddenly ugly, reprehensible, devoid of whatever we perceive as value, and most of all, painful.

The end of this song speaks to the daily hope to find more and more freedom from that trick mirror, and its daily distortions, and maybe, more importantly, the illusion of self. 

🎵 MUSIC

I love Sam Cartwright’s (drummer) playing on this. His groove is so greasy.

There is a magic and privilege to sitting in the studio, on the other side of the glass from the recording musician—being present when that ineffable moment occurs in their playing that gets everyone in the booth to turn to one another, jaws slack and eyes agog. “That’s it!” everyone says, without speaking a word.

Lyrics

Cotton candy trees 
Lucille and me

Draw me out
Into the stars
In your honeyed golden light before the dawn
Send me out
Like a shot
In a purple chariot 

Flying high above the world we know
Giving time for our love to grow

Come and see the moon
Underneath the door
Trace the light that’s spilling out across the floor
To the dawn
You and me
Carried out to god in green 

In a field where the flowers enfold
The two of us in a burnished gold

Now I 
I am losing time to pain
And you
You are losing time to shame
But I know, if we take it slow and
Open our eyes into the

Cotton candy trees 
Lucille

Let’s climb the stairs
Like we should
Going higher than we know we ever could
In a chair
Chair-o-plane
Swinging out in our own blue lane

Flying high above the world we know
Giving time for our love to grow

Leave behind
What never serves
Kiss the light n just to know what we are worth
Packing light
As we leave
Cause there is little that we need 

In a field where the flowers enfold
The two of us in a burnished gold

Now I
I am losing time to pain
And you
You are losing sleep to shame
But I know, if we take it slow and
Open our eyes into the

Cotton candy trees 

Lucille, Lucille step to the side
Lucille, Lucille turn, kick ‘n’ glide, 
Lucille, Lucille clap, spin and twist
Lucille, Lucille well it goes like this

Brown butter floss
And blueberry chai
Bubblegum pink and sugar cream pie
I slipped outside of my mind
To stop looking for what I could not find

Trick mirror says I look so good
Trick mirror says I never could
Trick mirror won’t you let me be
Trick mirror cracked now I feel free