Of Bloodlines and Blue Notes: Lyrics, Album Notes and Critical Essays

Of Bloodlines and Blue Notes is a project about inheritance in two registers, the one carried in the body and the one carried in sound.

It follows the ways family stories travel through generations, sometimes as truth, sometimes as myth, sometimes as a silence everyone learns to live around. In parallel, it traces the lineage of Black American music, where the blues and its descendants hold memory, grief, joy, survival, and coded history. The project moves between these bloodlines and these blue notes to ask a simple, hard question: what do we carry that is not fully ours, and what do we choose to pass on anyway?

Blending narrative, archival fragments, interviews, and an ear for rhythm, the work is structured like an album and a family tree at once. Scenes and voices recur with variations. Names repeat. Motifs return like a hook. The result is a living document, part testimony and part composition, that treats lineage as something you can hear, not just trace.

Of Bloodlines and Blue Notes invites readers to listen closely. To the stories we inherit. To the music that raised us. To the gaps that speak loudest. And to the possibility that understanding where we come from can change what we make next.