Singled Out: Ro Myra's Jump Into The Water

Keavin Wiggins | 08-12-2021

Ro Myra just released her new album, "Nowhere, Nebraska", and to celebrate we asked her to tell us about the song "Jump into the Water." Here is the story:

My friend J Wagner (who crafts gorgeous songs, some of which are on Gregory Alan Isokav's Grammy-nominated album, "Evening Machines"), introduced me to a songwriting process that I believe he created and calls "translitic songwriting." It was through this process that the third song on my album, "Jump into the Water," was born.

This process of song transliteration is by far one of my favorite methods of writing lyrics. To start the process, J Wagner gives us songwriters a poem that he created, usually by combining two different poems in archaic languages. Then he invites us to translate these poems into English. For "Jump into the Water," the original first line given to me was: "ha tua posto nel Votre gatto etoiles." My first translation of that line was, "Just quiet traverse appalled celestial incongruent." Then several drafts later that phrase turned into, "She poured me a cup of tea and said peace was never born quietly."

So in the beginning of this methodology, the words feel very much like a dream to me. Carl Jung said that dreams are always a little bit ahead of the dreamer's consciousness, which is what the process of writing "Jump into the Water" with the translitic method felt like to me. I felt like the song was teaching me spiritual lessons that I haven't quite grasped yet in my conscious state of being.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the album here