Travel till you reach the desert
Full and empty, wide as ever
Cactus with his withered wife
Snakes and lizards cling to life
In love forever. - from Hualapai Mountain
After two albums that explore narrative and its roots in traditional ballads, Andrew Calhoun returns to his compressed, impressionist style with fresh vigor and a new command of movement: breathtaking as always and accessible as never before. Songwriter/guitarist Calhoun's 9th album, 18 songs at 46 minutes, moves rapidly through intense feelings of love, longing, loss and redemption. Opening with harp and bowed bass on "Meditation Song," the disc moves from the playful, fiddle-driven treatment of a serious subject on "Witches", to "Two Roads," a grim blues about adultery; the manic word-play of "Farewell Butterfly" and the nightmare tale "Dancing with the Daughter of a Drunk." "A Hoosier in Paris," with accordion, bass, and dobro, inserts a note of comedy; "Broken Feeder" recounts a woman's recovery from grief, while "Hualapai Mountain" finds serenity in a desert landscape. "Shadow of a WIng" features the talents of Donny Wright (bass and dobro), Joe Root (accordion), Elizabeth Nicholson (Celtic harp) and Bob Soper (fiddle and mandola).
Still these fluttering wings
Fold them in by me
Stop these flutterings
Quietly.
Tracks: Meditation Song | Window | Sammy | The Promise | Two Roads | Witches | Daughter of a Drunk | A Hoosier in Paris | Smokin' and Drinkin' | Folklore | Inside Out | Single Roses | Fluttering Wings | Broken Feeder | Raining | I Love Your Letters | Farewell Butterfly | Hualapai Mountain
WINDOW
My love is a window
That looks from air to air
My love is deep as August,
Tender as despair
A throng of birds above us
A belly full of dreams
The moment where a magic trick's
Exactly what it seems
Still within the whirlwind
Infinity's embraced
Whatever you expected
Is swept up and erased
She is resting where the waters
Flow separately to one
I'll find her where the fire
Goes out to meet the sun
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