Drive Me There

Drive Me There is the final track on the piano record coming out in a week or so (7/25/25). I wrote it during my first stay at Azule, an artist residency in the foothills of North Carolina that has become a home away from home for me. I went there in the summer of 2016 intending to write a ballet — and I did — but while I was there, I also wrote this piece.

Azule itself is an incredible story. A couple bought a one-room cabin there in 1971, and over the course of fifty years, it gradually expanded into a bizarre mansion made almost entirely of reclaimed materials. The idea was to build a space where people could go to create — and they did.

Camille, the woman who founded it with her husband Dave, has been one of my greatest artistic influences. She’s now over 80. A quilter by trade and an architect by necessity, she built Azule largely on her own — transforming it from a hippie pipe dream into a fully realized place. And when I say she built it single-handedly, I mean that literally. Camille has one arm.

She was born outside of Normandy. As a young girl, her sister handed her what seemed like a toy — it turned out to be a bomb left behind by Nazis during World War II. It exploded in her arms.

There’s a large basement at Azule, now used by painters. Camille dug it out herself — with a shovel — over the course of a decade. When I asked how she managed to do that, she replied: “How we do anything… one shovel at a time.”

I could go on about how much I admire her, but instead I’ll share the program notes I originally wrote to accompany this piece back in 2016:

There are all sorts of strange little features in the house that, at first glance, make no sense. Doors in odd places. Windows in the ceiling. The kind of details that make you stop and ask, Why did she do that?

Camille and Dave were married on an airplane 2,000 feet in the sky. They spent nearly a year driving around the country in a van, searching for a place to call home. When they arrived here, they turned the van off — and never left.

They lived in that cabin for 44 years. It started small, but gradually became the structure it is today. Dave died in the house about a decade ago, after a long struggle with muscular sclerosis.

Suddenly, all those strange features made sense. The odd doors were for his wheelchair. The windows in the ceiling were so he could look up at the stars from bed.

On his final night, Camille said, he kept repeating the phrase: “Drive me there. Drive me there.”

She told me she has no idea what he meant. She shrugged and laughed gently: “I drove him crazy his whole life. Maybe this is what he meant.”

He’s buried just a short distance from the house, under a stone that bears the sole inscription: “Drive me there.”

She must have really loved him.