VARV
with featured songmaker Alina Hardin
Cordella is honored to feature song maker Alina Hardin.
Songs of joy and deepest tragedy have found a place in Alina Hardin’s oeuvre. Wild and free like Joan Baez; bluesy, raw and way-down-deep like Karen Dalton; she captures the special quality of each song with her ambient voice and brings new life forth from the rich hymnal of folk music.
Alina’s voice is striking—warm, wise, and confident. She is at home with her music, be it a piece of her own creation, like the featured “Let it Down,” or a song which has been handed down through generations. The listener is pulled in by her gentle croon and wrapped up in the warmth of her story. The places she loves and longs for are there too—imbuing the melody with the scents and sounds of redwood, desert, canyon, tide.
Great mountains and canyons take a long time to form, as layers of dust and life slowly settle together into rock. Each sedimentary layer is a “varv,” a part of a whole, a step in a cycle.
Whiled
I have felt my seasons shifting like a storm: clouded, electric, and ever changing.
As a storm, each time, they open and close to a calm
sitting quietly and politely with a hue of bitter and sweet nostalgia.
Feeling them gently and tasting them slowly is how I like it best.
Then, casting them willfully out on a tune, twined in a melody, wrapped in a fine chrysalis of
consciousness to become what they may.
We mend and mold with the abounding life that surrounds us, in all of its frailties and virtues,
darkness and light, ins and outs, we are forever shifting creatures.
To turn the storm waters to life and the lightening to warmth, that is the direction I’m out to know.
Alina has created a playlist of songs to share with our readers—songs which have settled and formed her own musical landscape, full of elemental resonance and contemplative power.
In each issue of Cordella we hope to present a new music maker, with a sample of her work and a playlist of her choosing.
all images © alina hardin
Alina Hardin
Alina Hardin carefully pairs words, flavors, and melodies. Raised in the northern foothills of California, pulled and driven by the long roads that wrap the earth, her music has taken her down some good ones. Currently based out of Los Angeles, she is a songwriter and recipe creator.