These are tunes made of stars and the night and a field full of the moon with one whippoorwill to match the weather of one's walk.  Truly top-notch music, all of it wonderfully made with an introspective bent and a rich dreamy life.  Dan Leigh is a songwriter who understands we dream more often awake than asleep.

The song "Away" really touched me with its melancholy in restraint.  "Bluebirds" felt like lyrical cinema and it plays like a forgotten memory.  There are moments when Leigh's voice reaches heights far beyond the typical pop song range, a vocal line that enters the mood of boy choirs singing for the liturgy, where in his words: "The Church doors have closed to the clergyman."

Leigh is always reaching and dreaming higher, to the farthest point possible; his songs are a dreamer's struggle with the wish for transcendence in a place of gravity.  He wants to recall what we lose after childhood, not only the innocence but how there's a timelessness in a laidback melancholy even in the midst of nature.

Recalling such bands as Travis or Radiohead, these are songs that tie the soul by its umbilical cord to the body, where spirit is pinned by matter, only to find in the voice a shining, shimmering, alchemical star.  The greatest yearning we have is mourning for what we cannot name, a mute feeling that goes beyond language's capability of expression.  And so it's best expressed in ethereal melodies and tone poems, bells interwoven with dark keyboards and textured guitars, all of it containing the various changing light of day, the wings of a bluebird, the moon over the night sea.

This breathtaking album is a great achievement, poetic without striving for too many roses, music that answers Gauguin's question: "Where are we going and why are we here?"  It just might be that Dan Leigh's music is eternity at a moment's notice, the timelessness of time.
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