Yesterday I played the Riley Boys and thought I would be able to give it sufficient attention to listen to it while I doing some mindless exercising.  But no ... I wound up on the couch, reading the lyrics, the notes on the songs, and giving it my whole attention.  This morning I read some of the lyrics to my husband, who has a hard time understanding lyrics, as a way to prep him before I played him the songs.  Steve's comment:  "She's a very bright woman."  He was impressed with the lyrics throughout.

I had heard the hauntingly beautiful "It's Better Not to Sail" before, but hadn't understood the metaphor before reading the notes.  For me, the song is a classic anti-war song - as good as any other ever penned in the genre.  Much of what moved and delighted me about the CD was Carol's sensibility and wit, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous.  I got a jolt of pleasure reading her note on "Water Walks" to the effect that evolution needs its own gospel songs and that she loves gospel music but hopes that one day it will have more "inspired, intelligent content."  I have the same feeling.  I love gospel music, but do I have to sing about Jesus saving me?  What about taking more pragmatic action?  What about helping each other?  Steve (and I) loved the Cell Phone and the Sea; we enjoyed the mock sorrow of the "hard times" theme and and sang along to "took a cell phone from a stranger, and I launched it in the air." Ah, how many of us have longed to do that?  "Brand New Shoes" had great, bluesey, rhythm; it was fun and got me up and dancing.  "Cookies" was, again, an amusing, down-to-earth song about what makes life worth living.... "I would have done it, just for the cookies."  I can relate to that.  Musically, the CD is a treat with some very nice back up.  It was like spending time with a witty, sensitive friend - who can sing, write songs, and get a group together.  It's a good time.
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Seeing Carol Denney perform at Strings in North Oakland on Wednesday night felt like an exercise in diametric convergence.  Just as opposites reputedly attract, Carol Denney seamlessly blends tradition with invention, heritage with novelty, then with now, music becomes poetry. Some might even call it art.  After bathing in the gentle rain of Ms. Denney's exquisite craft, I certainly would.
 
Her music is not fusion though.  It's just multifaceted as all get out.  What's intriguing about a Carol Denney set is the diversity of musical style, subject matter, and textured experience one travels in the space of an evening.  Her musical palette encompasses ballads, jazz, and blues, her uniquely rhythmic and melodic guitar style, the sometimes mournful, sometimes sprightly English concertina, and (on this night) banjo and fiddle.
 
Even over the scope of her too-brief two sets that added up to just nine songs, she demonstrated her impressive range of songwriting skills and seemingly effortless mastery of diverse musical styles.  Her sets showcased her biting and irreverent topical satire (including her comic query on the bailout of the financial industry Where'd the Money Go? and her barbed sea-shanty dig at the wealthy The Rich Will Never Be Poor), a light-hearted bluesy musing on singles' bar mores (It's Only Fair), rueful self assessments (the jazzy Wonderful Me, and the seductive lilt of The Cookie Song), and her ironic paean to mortality (The Cruel Lullaby).
 
She also treated us to the hauntingly beautiful Winter and I, her precise and poignant haiku-efficient portrait of a solitary man who survives the tourist-filled summer on a New England island only while drunk, but then embraces his solitary companionship with Winter only while "sober as stone."  Her It's Better Not to Sail is set like a diamond in a Scottish hymn that movingly cautions the young against a life at sea, but also, metaphorically, against military enlistment. 
 
The highlight of the evening was the wrenching emotional reverence of the title track of her latest CD: The Riley Boys, her lament for lives lost in the Iraq war.  This achingly beautiful hymn for concertina, fiddle, and Ms. Denney's uplifted voice evokes the sacred, nostalgia, sorrow, and comfort as it mourns the absence of the fallen.  The sense of loss, helplessness, and hopeful grief engendered by Ms. Denney's performance was tangible:
 
it’s so hard to read the news
and so beautiful outside
and the world that seemed so wide
now seems so broken
all the things we love and keep
in our dreams and in our sleep
startled birds that we have 
suddenly awoken 
if the Riley boys were here
they would tell us not to cry
dry your eyes they’d say 
there’s work to do tomorrow
if the Riley boys were here
we’d hold fast another year
and be thankful for what mercy
we could borrow
 
Would that life could imitate this art.  Ms. Denney is a treasure – a poetic voice of hope in a sometimes hopeless world.
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