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MP3 Atoosa Grey - When the Cardinals Come
10 MP3 Songs in this album (39:23) !
Related styles: FOLK: Folk-Rock, COUNTRY: Americana
People who are interested in Joni Mitchell Emmylou Harris Patty Griffin should consider this download.
Details:
The tale of the tortoise and the hare is well known and often referenced. It reminds us that there are two ways to win the race—immediately and haphazardly, or slowly, carefully and with great determination. New York musician and songwriter Atoosa Grey embodies the latter characterization. Grey, an Iranian-American who defied longstanding Persian family values to pursue an artistic career, has been honing her craft since she was child, electing to steadily improve her skills and allow her songwriting to mature and grow over time. Perhaps that is why Grey’s new album, When the Cardinals Come, which she spent nearly three years writing, greatly inspired by the poetry of Rumi and Mary Oliver, feels like the culmination of a life, rather than just another album churned out in the cycle. Grey, who polished her skills performing at New York’s Sidewalk Café with artists like Regina Spektor, the Moldy Peaches and Nellie McKay, has truly spent a lifetime developing her art.
“I learned classical piano as a child,” Grey explains. “I taught myself guitar at 17. I never went to college for music or voice. It’s developed over time. I finally got to a place where I felt confident as a musician—not just as a songwriter, but as a singer and an instrumentalist. For me, it was not an overnight process. All the records I’ve made until now have brought me to this point. All the imperfections I still hear on them. I just love music and I love words. It’s all been a progression.”
When the Cardinals Come was recorded, mixed and mastered in a mere nine days in New York. The process was notably facile, aided by the immediate synergy Grey felt with the collection of studio musicians who assembled to support her, most of whom were hand-selected by Grey’s husband and producer Noel Grey. The musicians, which include Grey’s longtime guitarist James Mastro (Ian Hunter, Patti Smith), pianist/organist Rob Burger (Lucinda Williams, Iron & Wine, Norah Jones), bassist Todd Sickafoose (Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird) and drummer Ben Perowsky (Elysian Fields, Joan as Policewoman), were instrumental in guiding Grey’s honest, evocative songs to their full potential.
“Everyone was really open in the studio and worked well together,” Grey explains. “The songs were really ready, too. It just came out. This is the quickest I’ve ever made a record. I usually keep going back in and changing things. I think it’s because for me as an artist I had gotten to a point where I knew what I wanted to say. It was exactly what I had been looking to do for a long time.”
The resulting album, which veers in style from Americana to pop-tinged folk to moody piano ballads, is charming and compelling, urged by Grey’s uniquely moving voice and connected with a common lyrical sequence that pulls the songs together into a cohesive whole. Its title, When the Cardinals Come, initiates that arc, referencing the red birds that reappear throughout the record to symbolize ideas of hope and luck. For Grey, whose mother believed birds were visiting spirits when she was growing up, the recurrence of powerful imagery and the undercurrent of a thematic narrative in her lyrics signals a key moment for her as a songwriter where she has successfully incorporated her vast array of influences—Eastern and Western, musical and literary, personal and universal.
“I feel like there’s a thread you can pull through the record,” Grey says. “There are these repeating ideas in there that are metaphors for things and those metaphors are found in some Eastern poetry. I’ve never had a record like that before, where it comes back again in all the songs. There are connections and that’s important.”
The title track, a dulcet song about being passionate for another person, reveals Grey’s propensity for crafting an intimate sensibility within her music, while the wistful “Red Fire” poetically negotiates what it means to fall in love and explores, musically and lyrically, the “unique journey that two people take together with no one else there inside the love.” “Radio,” an emotive track that appeared on Sound Travels Up, one of Grey’s three previous releases, is reimagined here as a sparse piano, bass and vocal arrangement to illustrate the way a song’s meaning has shifted for her over time and how an older song can retain its beauty and significance as that evolution occurs. Newer, country-tinged track “Great Big World,” a layered, mesmerizing number, examines having a relationship without losing yourself and recalls— as many of the tracks do—influential artists like Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin, Emmylou Harris and Carole King. Grey also offers her interpretation of classic favorite “Maggie May,” infusing the rock song with an ethereal, enchanting feeling.
“I want someone to feel the same way they might feel after reading a really great poem or something enlightening or uplifting,” Grey says of the album. “I think there’s a lot of optimism on the record. I think it’s romantic. There’s a purity to it because it’s truthful. I don’t see anyone walking away from the record thinking they want to dance to it. More in a dream state. And hopeful.”
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