After spending the majority of her adult life turning Angst into music, Cici Porter knew how to make her demons work for her. She was the director of her dramas, and they served her well.
And then she stumbled into a new well of inspiration that was too deep to fathom, and almost too dark to navigate.
"Music was always how I dealt with things, and usually, I was just dealing with bad relationships," the Oceanside-based singer- songwriter said with a half-smile. "But then the music I was writing started dealing with much heavier stuff. With `Don't Say a Word,' I remember I wrote it, and then went, `Ew,' threw it aside, and never played it for anyone."
Eight years later, the song she couldn't bear to keep is the cornerstone for an album that many people will not want to hear. The CD doesn't have a name or a release date yet, but it has already taught the singer this invaluable lesson:
Sometimes you find the song, and sometimes the song finds you.
When she was playing with local folk-rock combos Bordertown and Wooden Angel, Porter had a nice creative groove going. She wrote vivid, crowd-pleasing songs, recorded multiple albums (including two solo projects), toured occasionally and was a very visible part of the local-music scene. Bordertown was a local club -- and coffeehouse -- favorite, and before disbanding in 1992, the group was a San Diego Music Awards winner, and a finalist in Musician magazine's best unsigned-band contest.
But other things were happening in Porter's life, too. After the births of her two daughters in the late '80s, Porter says she was blindsided by long-buried memories of childhood sexual abuse. A two- week stay at a crisis center got her through the initial trauma, and therapy and the ongoing support of women's groups helped her inch toward recovery.
By 1992, the amicably divorced Porter had married fellow musician and Bordertown/Wooden Angel member Larry Groupe. In 1993, she gave birth to their son, Logan. She also talked to her parents, and after many emotional conversations, she "agreed to disagree" with them about her recovered memories. ("My parents will not be convinced," Porter said. "So I gave up and buried the hatchet with them.")
It took awhile, but Porter was getting her personal life back in order. And because she has been a musician longer than she's been anything else, writing songs should have been a natural part of the process. As it turns out, the songs were there, but she wasn't sure she wanted to let them out.
"When people deal with this subject in a song, nobody talks about it directly. You have to talk around it, or you have to really dress it up, and I had done both over the years. Eventually, I thought, `Screw it. This is what I'm dealing with, why am I dancing around it?,' " the 44-year-old Porter said, settling into a sunny spot in her homey living room.
"But writing that kind of song flew in the face of everything I do creatively. When I paint, I paint abstracts. And when I write songs, I don't like to come at things straight on. It's bad enough to open your mouth about this subject, let alone think you can sing songs about it, let alone sing songs that come right out and say it."
Once they came out, however, Porter couldn't make them stop. Throughout the '90s, she devoted herself to chronicling her rocky journey from paralysis to liberation. Her trip has been messy, complete with tears and addictions and melodramas. But her music did not have the luxury of self-indulgence.
"I knew that the songs had to be up to par musically, because the subject matter would be under fire immediately," Porter said. "I'm very aware that most people do not want to hear about this, so I had to get the emotional impact across while also keeping the level of musicianship high. The songs have to work musically, or there is no sense in doing it. It just perpetuates the misery. I'm a musician first; I'm not daytime TV."
From the chilling "Don't Say a Word" (Don't say a word or you're going to be sorry / Shut up and go to sleep) to the cathartic "My Story" (Deep inside the silence a woman starts to sing), Porter's songs serve their fury straight, with no poetry chaser.
The reliability of recovered memories is a hot-button issue, and the songs resulting from Porter's experiences are just as volatile. They are disturbing and painful, but they are also well-crafted and richly melodic. They move some people to tears while making others shift nervously in their seats. Porter performed them in public for the first time in 1997, and after her gig at a child-abuse recovery conference, the songs forced the singer to rethink everything.
"For almost 30 years, my career has been all about saying, `Hey, look at me, I'm special!' Now, my biggest fear is that someone will say, `Oh, she's over 40, she's a has-been, so now she's going to whine about this to get our attention.' But when I go into a women's prison or a recovery center and share these songs and the women really hear me, that makes it all worth it. Nothing even comes close to that feeling."
Like the songwriting process itself, Porter's journey from pop- rock chanteuse to recovery minstrel has been illuminating and tricky. While she was performing her songs of healing and discovery at conferences and recovery centers, Porter was also smoking marijuana every day. The contrast between her art and her reality sent her into a 12-step program, and three years later, the clean-and-sober Porter admits that her new music will also mean the end of her career as she's known it.
"I'm not going to sing these songs at Java Joe's (coffeehouse). I don't want to force this music on people who don't want to hear it. It's not for everybody," said Porter, who hopes to complete the album later this year. "This is my new material, and it's all I'm interested in doing. I can see myself spending the rest of my life singing in prisons and conferences and healing centers. I don't feel burdened by this career that I have to claw and scratch for, and frankly, it's a huge relief."
It's a whole new language I gotta learn how to speak / To say what I've got to say, Porter sings in "My Story." In the years since she wrote the song, Porter has found the new words she needed to make sense of her old story. Now that she's mastered the language, she hopes the message will be as clear to her audience as it has been to her. And just as hopeful.
"Abuse can happen to anybody, and it doesn't have to stop you from having a happy and free and fulfilling life. You can't use it as an excuse for your misery," Porter said. "We all have our stuff that has happened to us, and my message is that it is possible to get over it. I'm for everybody getting healed."
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