Michigan singer and songwriter Joe Reilly is proud to release Touch the Earth, his fifth solo album that follows the successful debut of his children’s CD, Children of the Earth, released in the fall of 2007. Featuring several Michigan artists and a handful of musical genres, Touch the Earth stays true to Reilly’s style and musical message: Music that strengthens community while embracing diversity, inspires listeners to experience the inter-connection with each other and their environment, and invites them to look deeper and connect with the positive aspects in their own nature.
The CD highlights talented Michigan artists including drummers Cen Dervin (Black Bottom Collective) and O. Andrew Schreiber (Nick Strange Band), guitarists Randall Beek and Billy King (Billy King and the Idylls), cellists Hayden Gandolfi and Mike Devol (Greensky Bluegrass), bassist Jeff Guevin, and vocalist Ann Judge.
Touch the Earth is akin to Reilly’s 2006 release, Planting Gardens, and showcases true genre diversity, taking listeners through an intriguing landscape of rock (Keep It Easy, Corners Of My Mind, Heal All Sides), hip-hop (Little Tomato), country (Mama’s Song), eco-rock (Tree Meditation, Touch the Earth), and meditative balladry (Sangha Song). Reilly’s honest and powerful voice and consistent message have the unique ability to pull the eclectic mix together. The end result is not so different from Reilly himself. With his Native American heritage, roots and upbringing in contemporary Catholic folk music, ever-deepening understanding of life through Buddhist meditation practice, and academic studies in environmental justice and racism, Joe Reilly has a natural ability to bring people together across diverse lines of race, class, gender, age, religion, ability, and musical genres.
It is clear from the first track of the album, when Reilly sings “Keep it E-A-S-Y,” that his songwriting invites listeners to smile, laugh, and sing with him. Reilly wrote ten of the eleven songs on Touch the Earth including “Little Tomato,” an eating meditation featuring a singing tomato. Reilly’s creative songwriting brings both humor and depth to something that seemingly is very ordinary.
Remembering “Keep It Easy” and enjoying the “Present Moment,” listeners are able to engage in the lyrical discussions of ecological cycles, meditation, global warming, war, and spirituality with an open mind. Whether it is in loving your own mother (Mama’s Song) or Mother Earth (Touch the Earth), Joe Reilly isn’t afraid to sing about our inter-connection with each other and our environment. A tree, a tomato, a guitar, and a human being are not such separate and isolated things.
Joe Reilly is on a spiritual journey that takes a musical form. In Touch the Earth, Reilly invites all of us, no matter our religious beliefs or non-beliefs, to journey together. Reilly has sought to be a peacemaker through his singing and songwriting for over a decade, sharing messages of peace and mindfulness in his songs to audiences in his home city of Ann Arbor, to the spacious urban farms of Detroit, throughout the mitten-shaped state of Michigan, and along the entire West Coast of the US in California, Oregon, and Washington.
“The earth has space to hold all your tears. The earth has space to hold all your fears. Your heart has space for everything you need. You’re a garden my friend, let us water love’s seed. You’re a garden my friend, together we’ll water love.” ~Joe Reilly, Touch the Earth
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