Album Notes

David Roon has been writing and performing music for over ten years, in the interstitial spaces between canoeing and exploring wild places, romping with family and friends, and other mischief.

Skies full of Seas is David’s first album. It opens with ‘The Gutter Song’, a fiddle and bouzouki-driven celebration of the confusion and delight that result from the collision of souls that are disparate but true. ‘Arctos’ is a musing on an encounter with a polar bear in Northern Manitoba, while ‘The Great Silence’ is a contemporary re-working of ancient Irish Selkie mythology. Guitar and Voice are the core instruments, augmented by bouzouki, fiddle, and drum.

The music on ‘Skies full of Seas’ draws from David’s lifetime love affair with Celtic music, a passion that started in Minneapolis , spurred by sneaking into late night gigs by local fixture ‘Boiled in Lead’. A study abroad in North Wales cemented this; a Guinness-fueled concert by seminal Irish band ‘Altan’ at the Bangor college bar was a pivotal encounter, as was a hitchhiking stint in Western Ireland.

David’s songwriting is also spurred by immersion in the work of lyricists like Bruce Cockburn and Luka Bloom, and by a childhood spent inhaling myth-driven literature, particularly the writing of C.S. Lewis. Songwriting tends to be lyrical and narrative. Many songs focus on human interaction, but concern for the future of the natural word is a recurrent theme, often lending a dark, apocalyptic edge to some songs. Years spent as a canoe guide and naturalist have formulated this perspective, as has David’s ardent but unconventional take on Christianity.