“Circumstance” was informed primarily by stories shared by two of the dozens of inmates at the Lynwood Jail and then the California Institution for Women in Chino whom Eleni Mandell worked with over a two-year period.
Eleni Mandell recently spent two years coaching female inmates to express their stories through song in the Jail Guitar Doors program, an experience she taps in her new single, 'Circumstance'
“Looking around and seeing their lives there — the lack of color, the drabness — that’s both the metaphor and very literal: Those are the only colors they are allowed to wear,” Mandell said in a recent interview during a break on her day job teaching English at a Los Angeles middle school. The connecting thread between the two was that both felt they landed in prison through circumstances thrust upon them, rather than as the result of their own decisions. “It wasn’t me who did these things,” Mandell sings. “It was my circumstance.”
It wasn’t her intention volunteering for Jail Guitar Doors to create an album of her own, but she did have a sense early on that it would lead to something, even if she didn’t know just what that would turn out to be.
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