Album Notes

'All right' said the cat;
and this time it vanished quite slowly,
beginning with the end of the tail,
and ending with the grin,
which remained some time after the rest had gone.
(Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland, Chapter VI)

The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland comes and goes, but after she has left, her grin is staying. She symbolizes a different level of perception, where we see a world apart from what we usually call 'reality'.
The album Cheshire Tree Suite by American songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Lou Maxwell Taylor also provides a different approach to the reality of our modern world: Taylor observes, asks questions and criticizes, sometimes with resignation, then again with new hope. Like a medieval minstrel, who has travelled the world, Taylor combines vison and reality, experience and dream. His music, his lyrics and his voice are inseparable parts of the whole of this album.
The arrangements involve instruments like the cello, mandolin, bodhran and clarinet, but also quite unusual instruments like sintharmonia, tar, kendang or dombek. Although the acoustic character is always dominating, these instruments are in dense interaction with the album's electronic elements.
The musicians who played with Lou Maxwell Taylor on Cheshire Tree Suite are among the crème de la crème of new and experimental music: Percussionist Michael Masley has worked for Garbage, Chris Isaak, und the great Ry Cooder. Radim Zenkl from the Czech Republic is an internationally renowned player of the mandolin, Barry Cleveland a successful and critically acclaimed guitarist and composer who has worked with guitarist Carl Weingarten and poet Craig Van Riper. Dan Reiter, whose cello parts add a dreamlike flavour to some of the tracks on Cheshire Tree Suite, has worked with Ali Akbar Khan and is the principal cellist of the California Symphony Orchestra in Oakland.
Special attention should be paid to Taylor's visionary lyrics - with some of them written during the gulf war, they mirror in an almost terrifying way the state the world is in today. In his lyrics he anticipated what many considered unthinkable: "I hear the song of the victors turn to the dirge of the assailed" (from "The Ruins of Babylon"). Lou Maxwell Taylor is a critical observer like few American songwriters in recent years. Yet, he is as convincing when he deals with poetical subjects as in "The Living and the Dead" or writes almost mystical lyrics as in "What Life Is", all interpreted by a voice that is warm and soft, yet rich of variations.
Attempts to classify this music only prove, how unique it is. They involve singers like Peter Hammill or Greg Lake and bands like Jethro Tull or the Waterboys. Yet, among Lou Maxwell Taylor's obvious influences we find the progressive rock of the Seventies, but also classical composers or Celtic and African music.