“Quite a few years ago, when I went through the most difficult time of my life, it felt like everything crumbled away. I was in the dark, completely in the dark. Through that process, I realized that the only thing that I could hold on to to guide me was my inner light,” Mary Jane Knight, a voice teacher in Iowa City, said.
On Sunday, March 23, Knight released her first album, “Rising Free: A Journey of Healing.”
The debut album is defined by Knight as a cross-genre piece, dipping its toes into adult contemporary as well as spiritual, soulful, and inspirational genres to create an amalgamation that is sure to have audiences weeping and jumping for joy.
As listeners start their voyage through Knight’s deeply personal and retrospective work, she guides listeners through a tale of depression, anxiety, hope, and healing. Her soulful, rich voice grounds the journey.
Her journey of creating this album came at a time when many tried to forge new artistic endeavors: during the 2020 pandemic. Knight said she had the idea to compose a song and loved the work of John O’Donoghue, a Celtic poet and theologian, and thus struck the idea to put his words to music.
After a couple of failed attempts, Knight had curated a beautiful arrangement she felt proud of. The only step left was to ask for the rights to the poem, and she was set. But the answer Knight received was not one she thought she would get.
“[The estate said], ‘I am so sorry you have done this, and you didn’t communicate with me earlier, but only his personal friends can set his words to music.’ This was after a series of ‘No’s’ in my life, and different doors had been shut. Finally, I thought, ‘I know what that means, Mary Jane, you have to start writing,’” Knight said.
The process of creating lyrics can be an arduous, largely unfruitful task until it isn’t. Knight said that at first her songs were born from poems that she had written, but then they would come from anywhere — but especially through mantras. These mantras are ones she still repeats to herself when she is feeling overwhelmed or anxious, and she hopes that her listeners will do the same.
“It moves to this kind of mantra, like the feeling of breathing. Just breathe. Remember to breathe because deep within I am free,” Knight said. “I want people not to feel so lonely.”
Through her journey, before she even knew she wanted to create an album, she thought of using these mantras for music therapy. Knight loved the feelings that music could create and wanted to use those feelings in her music to help others.
“The thing that I loved the most about music education was the ability for people that experience music to experience emotions that we all feel and that they can kind of be tangible and actually almost outside of ourselves and that we can experience them at the same time, and how powerful that is to be able to take that emotion and feel it in music. It’s just so powerful,” Knight said.
After being convinced by people around her, she assembled her created mantras in an album all by herself with the help of one community member who would play guitar. Everything else Knight largely did alone with the professional studio mics she has in her home — a process she was semi-familiar with from the 2020 poem she had worked with.
With a final product, she was ready to put out her album with the help of a publicist from California she met through an organization called Women in Music.
“I reached out, and she’s like, ‘You are the kind of project that I’ve always wanted to help,’” Knight said.
Since her publicist was in California, Knight was immersed in the music industry and was able to help Knight with all the small things that make an album professional.
“I don’t have any presence. I’m just, like, ‘Here’s my album, world,’” Knight said. “Life slams you into healing. It’s way too hard for anybody to decide to heal. It always comes out of what happens to you, but that healing journey begins, and you find the light from within.”