PREMIERE: Flamy Grant Channels the Divine on "Magna Mater"
PREMIERE: Flamy Grant was truly touched by a goddess on her new song "Magna Mater" -- a hair-raising collision of ancient Greece and bone-deep Appalachia.
Sometimes the muse inspires you, but, in Flamy Grant's case, her path to "Magna Mater was nothing less than divine. A quick web search for words that rhymed with "water" led Grant down a rabbit hole to the Greco-Roman goddess Cybele, intersex spirit of fertility.
With a little Appalachia-cation, Grant's latest barnburner imagines the "second coming" of Cybele right here, right now. She stalks the hollers with her twin wildcats, leaving ecstacy and wild overgrowth in her wake. The lyrics read like a Greek ode, but the song is nothing but country. There's no one better to serve Cybele than Grant with her own generous helping of heady self-confidence and un-containable voice. "Magna Mater" is hair-raising with its feeling of something ancient colliding with our own bone-deep traditions.
"I was raised on the power of myth and storytelling, especially the stories we tell about deities," Grant explains. "I've seen these stories used in a thousand ways to move, manipulate, motivate, menace, mollify, and make us feel, act, and behave in ways someone else wanted us to. My hope is that by sharing a little bit of Cybele's story through song, she might help us connect with the ways we ourselves want to feel, act, and behave. She created one hell of a myth, and at the very least she deserves her spot in deity lore as an intersex goddess heavy with themes of fertility, nature, and, of course, mothering."
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