erykah badu just might save my life. this cd is perhaps the greatest music i have heard in a long time. she is really helping me to take the journey to that new time and place. in my mind anyways. for as long as the 11 tracks last.

"my tale is a simple one. it starts off like all the rest... there once was a beautiful prisoner, i mean princess. she longed for a brave knight, a gentleman. one with courage and honor and decency. but in a cruel world such as this, men like these were scarce indeed. she had a lot more than most, this princess. she had hope. the ability to see things the way she dreamed them. she could envision the exact moment she would be delivered from her____(fill in the blank). she set out like the alchemist to go and meet her destiny, but got bored, and decided to plant a garden along the way. it was an amazing garden... purble and black and white and golden. there was one particular tall pink flower that stuck out in the weeds of this garden. she noticed it there, but didn't realize how much taller and bigger than everything else it had become. it was beautiful and mysterious in it's freedom, but everythign growing around it seemed to be struggling to survive. it was as if that flower was drinking up all the water; sucking up all the sun. it was allowing nothing else to grow. i even think she (the flower) was unaware of her surroundings in her attempt to merely survive. and if she could indeed think, i doubt she would wish harm on anything or anyone or even know what harm was. she probably knew even nothing of her own fate. i imagine that she, like many things in nature, was just living for her own purpose and knew nothing of severity nor humility. the princess named her impatient and passed her off as another beautiful thing that grew up out of some careful, dedicated hard laborious act of her own careful planning. but in fact, it was just the opposite. impatience had grown tall as a result of... well, simply out of neglect and poor management. she (the princess) had no control. the end."