Genesis (N)one

Album: Genesis (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • Genesis 1 is the first chapter of the Bible, which opens:

    In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth

    Later in the story, God creates Adam and Eve; when Eve eats the apple - the forbidden fruit - it's the original sin and gets the couple banished from the Garden of Eden.

    In "Genesis (N)one," Misty Boyce re-evaluates this story in modern times and concludes that Eve got a bum rap:

    Men getting rich
    From me paying for my sins
    If admission to heaven
    Costs me faking
    I won't make it
  • Misty Boyce talked about this song when she appeared on the Songfacts Podcast. "I was raised Christian on the evangelical side," she said. "I was definitely indoctrinated and drank the Kool-Aid up until age 22, when I was the musical director at a megachurch. That experience made me say, 'This is a charade.' It was a prototype of Joel Osteen - you can copy and paste that guy into 10-12 major pastors at megachurches across the country. It's all the same schtick. They study comedians and it's like a play. They use the music to elicit emotion and then use people's vulnerabilities against them to be like, 'You're not enough. You need this and we have it. Pay us money.'

    It broke my heart to watch something so pure get used against people that way totally broke me. So, I was like, 'F--k this,' and started a very self-destructive journey to find my own truth. I decided to find it by just living.
  • On her song "The Clearing," Boyce sings about building a better world for women, a theme she revisits here. "The #MeToo movement kind of cracks open some of these storylines for me in a new way," she told Songfacts. "Adam and Eve is the first 'bros before hos.' They totally threw Eve under the bus. Adam was 100% complicit in eating that apple. He can make his own decisions. And she wanted to know stuff? That's a great quality. 'If I eat this, I might understand more, and I want to understand more.' Why did she get painted as evil for wanting to know some stuff?"

    "That's not to say men are evil," she added. "No one in this story is evil. But it's difficult to have these paradigm shifts. Accepting that you believed a lie for most of your life for a lot of people is too hard to look at because it changes everything. I watched it in my own mom with the #MeToo movement. She's had to suffer so much trauma at the hands of men and this patriarchy that looking at it would break her heart again knowing the life she could have had. People have been robbed of beautiful lives just for the sake of power and control."
  • Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes sings on this with Boyce. It was produced by Jon Joseph, who also played the guitars. Boyce handled keyboards, which is her specialty; she had toured on the instrument behind Lord Huron, Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Bareilles.

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