Moira Chicilo’s "Carry Them with Me": A Song of Memory, Family, and Inheritance
In her latest song, Carry Them with Me, Moira Chicilo, a singer-songwriter, provides listeners not just music, but meditation. Inspired by a journey to see her extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the song hauntingly explores the way stories, laughter, and even silences transfer from generation to generation, becoming us. Chicilo reminds us that family is never just the faces around the table, but those who are absent whose memory lingers behind in echo of photograph and whispered tale. In lyric sweetness, she interweaves the thought that heritage is not just history—it is a legacy of love.
The germ for the song was implanted in a thoughtful wistfulness: sorting through old pictures with her cousin Jesse. It was an reunion with bittersweet acceptance that this one would never happen again so much as it had previously. That epiphany—that memory dies if not tended—forced itself into Chicilo's songs. Carry Them with Me became not just an exploration of this disappearing family ritual, but a vow to preserve the histories, artifacts, and voices that tie us to the generations that have come before us. Every line is the burden of an heirloom, hand to hand.
Musically, Chicilo brings memory to the forefront in sound. Fragile acoustic fingerpicking creates a space that is homey and intimate, but pedal steel guitar wails with some kind of ghostly imperative, like recalling how memory takes flight but never departs. Her singing, close-mic'd and warmly recorded under the watchful gaze of World Peach Records' Jayne Trimble and Blue Door Recording, is as though she's whispering in your ear. The program leaves nothing at arm's length; it invites you into the room, into the story, into the closeness of family.
What is great about Carry Them with Me is its balance. It respects the grief of losses but never gets stuck in desperation. Instead, it seizes the labor of memory as an act, indeed a thanksgiving—a duty to hold on to what is slipping through our hands. Chicilo's song refuses the desperate haste of the moment and commands us to remain stationary and take with us the people and the moments that brought us. Listening is less about pressing play on a song and more about the possession of a keepsake, one reminding us where we're from and why that's important.
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