audrey_auld_stinson
MUSIC: Country singer Audrey Auld, who moved back to Stinson Beach from Nashville last year, has released a new album, “Hey, Warden,” featuring lyrics written by inmates at San Quentin State Prison written during workshops she held during the last several years.   David Briggs

In 2007, country singer and songwriter Audrey Auld started visiting San Quentin State Prison to host songwriting workshops for roughly a dozen or so inmates. She offered an idea or song title for the inmates to contemplate and write about for a couple of hours. Then she brought their jottings home, cutting and pasting their lines into the lyrics for a new song. “There are a lot of musicians in prison, so it was a great chance to…be exposed to their writings. It’s very truthful and gritty,” said Ms. Auld, an Australian who lived in Stinson Beach about a decade ago, moved for Nashville and returned to the seaside village last year after being diagnosed with cancer. The sessions with the inmates resulted in eight country songs with titles like “Naked and Nameless” and, Ms. Auld’s favorite song of the collection, “I Am Not What I Have Done.” Those lyrics explore the pain of being tied to a single, rash act that, however wrong or criminal, is not the entirety of their identities: “The bullet left the chamber, traveled through the air/Before the smoked had cleared it all became clear/Everything is final but by then it was too late/So now I sleep and wake and sleep and wait.” Ms. Auld first visited San Quentin as a performer in 2006 with the nonprofit Bread and Roses, which brings music to people otherwise isolated from society. She recorded the album of songs from the workshops—titled after the first track, “Hey Warden”—in Nashville in 2014, before she left. But the album did not mark the conclusion of her visits; in just the past few months, Ms. Auld has performed at San Quentin three times. In March, the inmates watched the music video for “I Am Not What I Have Done.” The men stood to applaud the song, and told Ms. Auld that the men in the video who endlessly walk in circles (around a brick peace sign in the grass) reflected how they felt in the confines of prison. Hey Warden is available at the Stinson Beach Bookstore, The Last Record Store in Santa Rosa, cdbaby.com, or Amazon.