Grain for the Harvest: Inna Zhelannaya and "The Wheat"

Here in Albuquerque, in the depths of the summer heat, it's hard to think about fall right now.  Temperatures range into the 90s, and even over 100 F yesterday.  For most of my childhood, my life was spent in three seasons: summer, winter and spring.  My hometown, because it is in a mostly conifer belt, did not have the explosion of fall colors that characterize many of the other regions of the United States.  It wasn't until I moved to the Midwest after college that I saw fall colors in their true glory, and fall remains a spectacular affair that seems all too brief to me.

I also grew up in timber country, not farmland, so the fall harvest of grains was not part of my life.  Yet driving through the fields of the Midwest in the fall, the tall grains like wheat waving in the late fall breezes, shining reddish-golden in the late afternoon sun, is something that I still remember.  There is a calm peacefulness about it, with brief signs of the coming winter as the threshers take the wheat, the leaves begin to turn, and the sun goes down earlier each day.  While I didn't grow up in that type of environment, I can still appreciate it for what it is.

In the same way, I can appreciate Inna Zhelannaya's song The Wheat.  I did not grow up with a lot of electronica in the music that I listened to, but rather was fed on a steady diet of rock and pop.  I am a relative latecomer, in my 40s, to the appreciation of the electronic enhancements that can be applied to music and now at 50 find myself hearing a lot of it on the world music scene.  The Wheat is not an overly electronic song, but instead layers a landscape that befits wheat that is about to harvested, with Zhalannaya's haunting voice overlaying the music like the coming thresher - not grim or even frightening, but inevitable.

Inna Zhelannaya was born in Moscow in 1965 and grew up studying music in school and singing in choir.  After finishing primary school, she attended a music college.  After school, she participated in a number of bands in the 1980s and 90s.  Most notable among these bands was Alliance, which won Radio France International's Best Eastern European album in 1994.  However, soon after Zhelannaya had to leave the band to give birth to a child.  She returned after with a new band called Farlanders, which released three albums.  As of 2013, she has a new band and has released three solo albums.  In her solo work, she reworks old Russian folk songs, some as old as 1000 years, with electronica, trance and progressive rock.  Because of her efforts, and the popularity of her albums, she has been called the "first world music star of Russia."

The Wheat is from Zhelannaya's album Winter, released in 2009, which marked a new direction for Zhelannaya - her voice intricately interacting with electronica and sound design.