Album Notes

Excerpt of Album Review by Richard Cusick of High Times Magazine:

"tRip features 13 songs and the CD includes a 14th “hidden track.” Standout tracks include the ethereal “love,” simple, slow and soaring surrounded by samples of found sound dropped like stones creating ripples on the pond. There is the joyous “Flying Machines” and the elegiac “My Friend,” about a close friend who passed away eight years ago. “It’s an expression of loss but I don’t think it’s a depressing song,” Ms. Ladd reflects. “It talks about how it’s easy to be angry and upset and sad but I’m also trying to be happy and know that my life is different. It’s a very meaningful song. It’s the last one I recorded and finished.” A uniquely stripped-down track, “My Friend” features a bare guitar and spare vocal. Amber says, “Really that one’s a lot of raw emotion. I didn’t think it need anything else.”

“Brite” is perhaps the most realized track, a song that successfully limns Ladd's personal and musical philosophy.

“It’s about how we have immense light inside us if we choose to see it, and that we’re the only ones who can prevent that light from shining and doing all the wonderful things that letting that genuineness show does for people in their lives. We’re the only ones who can stop ourselves from doing that,” Amber thinks it’s an important message. “Every single person has that magic in them equally and that every single person can make their own world what they want it to be.”

But certainly, to these ears, the most endearing song on tRip is “420,” Ms. Ladd’s musical shout out to the movement with which she identifies so completely. “The movement is a cool thing to be involved with and to be behind because the nature of the people I deal with and because of the reason we smoke, The reason we get together and blaze is to chill and to love each other and relate to each other and how could anyone find that to be wrong?"

“I went to a rally for the Kindred Cafe raids in Toronto (in 2008). We were all in this room and everyone was stoned and there was a lot of terminally ill medical patients and a lot of people in recreational support and all these walks of my life were together in one room. This is when I actually decided to really really speak out for the movement – this night – when the speaker said, “Look around you and feel the love in this room right now. How can this be an illusion?”"