Director Statement

I didn’t set out to make a film. I am a songwriter. For most of my life, when I have needed to understand something I couldn’t quite articulate, I have written a song. Songs have been how I process memory, longing, loss, love, and the passage of time. Canyon Angel began in much the same way, not as a documentary, but as a song that led to a musical and personal journey I felt compelled to follow.

For more than twenty-five years, I have been writing songs inspired by Los Angeles and the Laurel Canyon musical movement that captured my imagination long before I ever fully understood why. As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I felt an increasing urgency to finish the final song in what had unknowingly become a personally revealing five-song cycle. That song was “Canyon Angel.”

I wanted to record it with the musicians whose playing had helped create the musical language of the late ’60s and early ’70s that first inspired me. So I went to Los Angeles and stepped into a studio with iconic members of The Section, Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel, along with others from that time: Waddy Wachtel, Jim Cox, and Dan Dugmore. We brought cameras. I thought we were documenting the making of a record. Instead, I began to see a story.

The deeper I went into the songs, the more they seemed to be pointing backward and forward at the same time, toward places I had been, choices I had made, people I had encountered, and parts of myself I had perhaps stopped hearing. Lyrics written years apart began to feel connected. Memories took on different meanings. What seemed like just a collection of songs began to reveal itself as a kind of map. And following that map became the film.

Although Canyon Angel unfolds within the world of music, I do not think of it as a traditional music documentary or a biography of a musician. Music is the vehicle. The deeper subject is self-discovery.

The songs and their lyrics become an essential narrative language in the film. At times, they say what I cannot say in an interview. They connect past and present, reality and memory. Visual imagery, graphics, archival material, and moments of animation allow the film to move into the more interior space where memory and music often live. I want the audience not simply to hear the songs, but to experience the emotional connections inside them.

Directing this story, while also being its subject, presented a challenge I never anticipated. I had to learn when to look outward as a filmmaker and when to allow myself to remain vulnerable as the woman experiencing the story. In some ways, songwriting prepared me for that. A songwriter learns that specificity can become universal: the more honestly you tell one person’s story, the more likely someone else is to recognize something of their own in it. That became especially important to me as the film evolved.

This is a woman-centered story, and it is very much a midlife story. There is a particular moment when the accumulation of years can cause us to look at our lives differently, not simply at what we have accomplished, but at what remains unresolved, unexplored, or unrealized. I became interested in the idea that “becoming” does not belong exclusively to youth. We can still evolve into something new without abandoning who we have already been. For me, that realization also brought an unexpected measure of healing.

I don’t believe one needs to be a woman, a songwriter, or even an artist to understand that experience. Most of us carry some quiet voice within us—a dream, an instinct, a question, a part of ourselves that persists despite time and practicality. We may ignore it. We may outgrow the circumstances in which it first appears. But sometimes it keeps calling.

Canyon Angel is a story about listening to that voice. Because some voices don’t disappear with time. Sometimes, they are waiting for us to finally hear them.