Mississippi Medicine opens with herbal, woody top notes of freshly gathered juniper branches, twigs, lichen-clad bark, and sweet grassy violet – damp, cool, and dense with a stunning realism. Birch tar emerges like smoke mingling up through the wood and herbs of the pyre before it is consumed in flames. As the birch smoke floats above the skin in wafts of muted, spectral, gray in the scent’s unfolding, the base of dry cedar and frankincense grows stronger.