Tori On "Unrepentant Geraldines"

Unrepentant Geraldines
That's the Irish connection again
I mean Ireland has this crazy pull for me
Something happens
I don't even have to go there
I can be traveling the worlds and I can just, I don't know
get called, get called back by the mythology
The mythology does something to me
I think you feel it in 'Wedding Day' it shows itself through the record
It's very much the driving force behind Unrepentant Geraldines
because I started writing the song there in one day
and then I was there for several days and the song started to shift a bit
once I began really seeing that it wasn't just about one person called Geraldine
It was that any woman can be this person who has to stand by
what she believes in at a certain point
And I was thinking about her story and my mother-in-law
and my mother-in-law's older sister, who, believe it or not,
when you're talking to teenagers about how fortunate they are it's... they'll look at you and say 'Well, things are really tough for us out there'
and they are tough for them in some ways
but Tash, my thirteen year-old, was having to hear how women had
-these women are still alive-
didn't have the opportunity she did or did for a moment
and then they were snatched away
And her great aunt was telling her she built radios and planes in World War II
and went up in the planes without having to be a wife,
without having to be a mother
And of course those GI's were roaming around
and nobody was talking out of school about what all that was about
And of course when the war ended then these judgements started to happen for the women and they had to go back to the kitchen
And at the time, that wasn't a place of having your own T.V. show
and cooking and being on the cooking channel and all that
It was being relegated to you don't get to choose what you want to do
This is what you do
This is your place
And so, some women had to be very apologetic for some of the things that they were doing in the war, the relationships they had,
the passions they had, some people had children
then some of those children were taken in by the soldiers
that were coming back to save face because it was shameful
And so when Tash was hearing these stories from her mother-in-law
and her aunt what it was like, not that that was their personal story
but what it was like, you begin to see how these women they're alive
and they're telling me that the world was so different for women
So different that I started to think about being unrepentant
And turning fifty is a time when, although there might be regrets in your life,
how you handled things, there's a certain time with your work and as an artist where you have to stand firmly where you stand, no excuses and truly be unrepentant and unapologetic as a creative force