Free advice members of the folk-rock band Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem give during concerts: if you’re not happy, lower your expectations.
The homespun wisdom always gets a chuckle, but for lead vocalist and fiddle player, Rani Arbo, it remains a useful reminder to let go of her goal-setting, glass-half-full tendencies and just, ahhh, be in the moment.
That ahhh is a sound my yoga teacher makes part way through practice. The first few times she did it, I giggled. It seemed so contrived. But then I tried it and, ahhh, you know what? It really works! I could feel my list-making, fretting self drop to the floor like a scratchy sweater. In getting to know Rani Arbo, a longtime member of the east coast folk scene, I thought of the last few years of her life as one long downward dog and the coming into that ahhh place.
Rani isn’t shy about saying that she can be a bit on the glass-half-empty side of things and leans more toward Type A than, say, Type Z. But two recent life events have helped her uncoil. First, she became a mama and then she discovered a lump in her breast and rode the wave that is cancer. Today, she is a survivor with a decidedly brighter take on life and a greater propensity for letting out a loud ahhhh when things get intense. Not that it came easily.
“I’d known that we were going to be parents together from the beginning,” Rani says of her husband, Scott Kessel, who plays percussion in daisy mayhem. “Still, I had to think down every road before we went ahead with it.” She kept trying to calculate the “right” time to have a baby. It had taken her nearly seven years to decide to marry Scott; she wasn’t rushing into anything. Finally, an older folk musician told her, “Before you have a child, you’ll weigh all of the things that you won’t be able to do any more. But what you don’t know yet is that when that child comes along, you’ll have the most compelling reason not do those things.” It was the permission she needed.
Quinn was born in February 2004, erasing any doubts that his mama had. He went on the road with the band at just five weeks, proving a natural traveler. Rani’s mother often accompanied them, and out-of-town shows became excuses for visits to zoos and parks. When he was seven months, though, Rani had to admit that what she’d tried to convince herself was a plugged duct was actually growing.
“One night I had a really awful, gruesome dream,” she recalls, her lush alto growing slow and somber. It wasn’t so much the content of the dream that jolted her, but a sense of impending doom. “I woke up and immediately called the nurse to get me in for an appointment.” A biopsy indicated Stage Two breast cancer of a very fast-moving variety. In two weeks, Rani weaned Quinn. Then came a series of decisions, none of them easy, that confront many cancer patients: What kind of treatment to pursue? Whether to participate in a drug study? Eventually, she opted for a mastectomy, followed by chemotherapy, radiation, and a yearlong dose of a new drug that had recently been released.
Through it all, her singer-songwriter mind was percolating. She wasn’t actively writing because her energy was low and her focus was on recovery, but at some level, the music was there, pulling her through. Just before diagnosis, she’d heard a song played by a young band called Resophonics. She’d liked it enough to remember it, and when she got the news of the cancer, she immediately thought I need that song.
The appeal of the infectious romp, with its gospel and old-time country elements, is easy to hear. “Joy Comes Back” is a call to overcome life’s tough patches: “I’ve been tied to the ground, Lord, I’m getting lighter every day … I want to be ready when joy comes back to me.” After listening to the song repeatedly during treatment, its message to Rani was “You have to take care of your core until you’re ready to receive and give again. There’s a simultaneous acknowledgement that things positively suck and can get better.”
After chemo and radiation, she gradually returned to songwriting with hopes for a new daisy mayhem recording. One of the first songs she wrote was inspired by a younger singer, whom she’d seen at a festival. Hearing the young woman’s affirming lyrics, Rani, who laughs easily at herself, thought, “Why don’t I ever write one of those?” The result was “Big Old Life,” the title song of the recording Rani and her three band mates started last fall, a few months after she’d completed treatment
By the time they went into the studio, the band members, who are good friends in addition to having played together for seven years, had been through Rani’s illness and had also all become parents. They were primed to let go of earlier, younger expectations for themselves and just have fun. “We kept this album raw and honest,” says Rani. Rather than multitracking, they recorded each song live a few times and then chose the best track. The result is a spiritually uplifting recording that remains as much fun to perform live as it was in the studio.
In the meantime, Rani is doing her best to take care of herself, something that she says can be “brutally hard to do as a mother.” She’s hired a tour manager, saving her from some of the busy work she’d grown to dislike, and attended a weeklong yoga camp this summer. “It was amazing how much nicer I was that week!” she laughs, and I can just hear the big ahhh rippling through her life.
Photo: Mary Beth Meehan