1. Desperado's Curse

As I’ve said before, The Midnight Balladera's tale began at the ending. I was grieving when it came to me—wandering through Muerte Valley in my mind—and that’s where it started. Not with a plot, not with a song, but with a haunting.

The story began to shape itself around me. That’s when she came—the Wild Western Witch. She wasn’t a character I invented. She was a narrator, a guide, a voice that spoke through me to tell Angel Badman’s tale. And though I’ve always been Angel, in many ways, it was this mysterious witch who wrote the book.

Madame Vióla Vang

As the story unfolded—braiding Wild West outlaws with pagan rites and folklore—I found myself reclaiming parts of me I had long silenced. I was raised around goddess-like women, mystics and priestesses, though I denied my spirituality for years. Back then, the occult wasn’t as welcome- nor something you could access on a street corner. It was taboo. Dangerous. So, I buried that part of me.

I was a dark alley punk rocker- to a desert cowgirl, running from state to state.

Whenever I forgot my cosmic side, my life spiraled into chaos. Hellish, even. This truth—that forgetting my spirit was a curse in itself—began to bleed into my characters, their choices, their fates.

I still don’t know if the Wild Western Witch is a ghostwriter from the brothel days… or a buried voice in my own psyche. Maybe therapy will tell me. But one thing’s certain: she had a name. And her name was Madame Viola Vang.

I met her when I first moved to Eureka Springs. My first unofficial home was an old brothel room above the Cat House Lounge. I was just a waitress—but I’d sit there doing my makeup while the bar below clanked and roared, the jukebox spinning under my feet. That’s when I started sensing her—this sharp, silver-haired entity with Southern charm and a stabbing wit. She wasn’t from here. She was from the Faroe Islands, and she’d crossed oceans after seeing a twin flame in a looking glass.

But the frontier wasn’t what she expected. Neither was he.

The man in the glass turned out to be a maverick—a wilder bad man. Viola took up work as a saloon girl just to survive, and he judged her for it. In the end, he left her for a soft, oaky little good girl. Viola’s heart shattered. And in her rage, she cast a curse—not on him, but on his unborn daughter: Angel Badman.

You see, he believed Viola belonged to the night. That she was as fleeting as gold. So Viola turned his judgment into a prophecy—and placed it on the child.

And now, that child, bearing the hex of the West is just that: fleeting as gold, and dark as midnight. That's me.

Seers in my town have spoken of her. This white-haired figure walking behind me. Watching over me. Maybe she was my spirit guide. Maybe she was my ghost writer.

But either way, in my book, her name was Viola Vang.

And she was the Desperado’s Curse.

Flash forward to real time—March of 2025. I was flying from Arkansas to California to record, carrying both excitement and the weight of something unraveling….

Listen to the rest of this blog, in an audio note in The Midnight Deluxe Songbook. {This is her dusty trail, but the Gold Edition is her Temple}

Accoustic Version of Desperado's Curse