Claudia Bruce Releases I SIT IN MY ROOM Album
The album compiles songs written by Linda Mussmann for theatrical productions across a 50-year creative partnership.
Claudia Bruce has released her first album, I Sit in My Room, a collection of songs written by Linda Mussmann for theatrical productions performed by Bruce. The songs span forty years, from 1984 to 2024, and were recorded together in a single day by Bruce, now 80.
In the title song, 'I Sit in My Room,' written in 2001 when Bruce was 55, a woman looks out her window and considers what it means to grow older: 'I am more history. / I am less future now.' Bruce sings those same words at 80.
Elsewhere on the album, time is recorded, rewound, fast-forwarded, forgotten and remembered. In 'I Picked Up the Camera,' the singer moves backward and forward through recorded images, asking, 'Who am I? Who are they? Who are you? Who are we?' before arriving at 'We make our history together.' In 'The Remains,' Mussmann writes the line: 'Oh, sing me a song, Claudia / For it is the thing that stirs my heart.'
The songs on the album resist easy classification, including waltzes and riddles, protest songs and lullabies, love songs, warnings and meditations on memory and death. A gentle ukulele accompanies a list that moves from babies being born and falling in love to the siege of Mariupol and the dropping of the bomb. 'Riddle' tumbles through Oedipus, Indiana, American politics and the declaration, 'I like Ike, but I'm a Dyke.' Bruce's own 'The 99 Song,' written in 2011, turns the language of Occupy Wall Street into a protest song.
Bruce and Mussmann began working together in 1976 and have spent fifty years creating theater, music, film and visual work together. Bruce has been Mussmann's muse, collaborator and principal performer in more than 100 productions written and directed by Mussmann. Partners in art and in life, they married at TSL at midnight in 2011, among the first same-sex couples able to marry in New York.
About the Album
I Sit in My Room is available now on Bandcamp and through Time & Space Limited.
Claudia Bruce will celebrate the release of I Sit in My Room at TSL on September 19. For more information about the album, the release party and Time & Space Limited, visit timeandspace.org.
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