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.
