This is it. Dream come through. With your support, Alexandra Blakely and friends will be recording an album entirely dedicated to grief in July 2023 with over 150 voices. This album is called “WAILS: songs for grief,” and it is inspired by the five gates of grief from Francis Weller’s book, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow.” There will be a song for each gate - an opening and closing song and an opening and closing invocation/prayer/spell. This album is meant to be like sitting in a circle, a ceremony if you will, to honor grief in a culture that is grief-illiterate & grief phobic.

Update 3-12-23

Although we have reached our online goal, our second fundraising strategy for the production of the album will be through the summer recording gathering we are curating (see more below). This means we are still accepting donations through this gofundme campaign. Every contribution gets poured into the making of the album. 

Fundraising history: 

On 11-11-22 we launched this fundraiser and 1 month and 4 days later we collectively reached our goal of $11,111. On March 11, 2023, we had an in-person fundraiser in Seattle, WA and collectively raised $10,000 in one night, in 3 hours! Over a hundred people joined us that evening to support the eagle-eye vision of WAILS. Visionaries are we. To create an album that will reach into the homes of thousands, if not millions, to invoke this apprenticeship with sorrow (as Francis Weller would say), and hopefully inspire the act of not only communal singing but communal grieving.

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Will you join us in this project?