Eleanor Crossing the Water

By: Peter Lancellotti
Posted on: January 6, 2025

Before leaving New England to drive across the country and settle on the west coast, this was the last song I wrote and recorded in a studio there. The engineer who mixed it, a drummer, seemed to like the Roland TR-707 (yes, that’s how old I am) to the point of crossing into the red zone. However, that’s not the crossing referenced in the title. I did my best to clean it up with open source software, but it was still unacceptable.

Then I met a new friend, Aaron Leet, from the band, Dashing Skull Club. Aaron is a top notch engineer and took the badly mixed tracks from cassette, converted them to MP3, then to a WAV file, and back again to MP3, using software that was way over my head. In only two sessions, he corrected many things wrong with it. Aaron is a perfectionist. I am grateful that he’s gotten as far as he has with what he had to work with. Because of his amazing engineering for his own band and being a true altruist, he wishes to continue helping me with some of the more difficult recordings now that I no longer have the master tapes.

When I wrote the song, I’d been reading a lot about Eleanor of Aquitaine at the time, a powerful woman who owned one of the richest provinces in France. Once married to King Louis VII, having only two daughters, she was able to have their marriage annulled as they had no son for an heir. She went on to marry Henry, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy only weeks later. He became King Henry II of England in 1154 and she became queen. However, after having eight children and becoming enthralled in a dangerous political battle of wits, Henry imprisoned her for 16 years and only let her out for holidays and state occasions. She’d come over from various castles in a barge crossing the Thames (also called the River Isis), hence, Eleanor Crossing the Water. The song is a modern depiction of her crossing to wherever Henry wanted her to be. The formal structure of the piece is demonstrative of how her mind worked, more than a wild nature for a woman during that time period. The queen’s free-spirit is depicted in the improvisation of the guitar track.

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