Album Notes

Delivering a blend of rock, funk, jazz and blues, Darcy Menard is a musician with a sound fully infused with his musical roots. On his 2005 release, In Flight, tracks range from rock to jazz influences to delta-blues. The well-crafted songs are infectious, energetic, and straight from the gut.

Menard plays a lap hawaiian slide on three tracks--the delta-blues slide guitar is contrasted with a modern rhythmic backbeat to give a fresh sound to familiar themes. Menard's electric guitar playing has a strong rhythmic feel--something he attributes to playing often as a solo performer.

The tracks are not the standard verse and chorus structure of the modern pop song, but instead the larger single repeating form of blues and jazz. "I like to think of many of these songs as modern blues numbers," Menard says. "To write a modern blues tune, all you've got to do is conjure up an item from your endless internal gripe list." This is exactly the process that inspired "My Rent," a delta-blues influenced stomper that works on multiple levels.

Menard's influences include such diverse pop artists as Jimi Hendrix and Paul Simon. He also cites jazz masters Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Sonny Rollins as huge influences.

In Flight is a melding of this inherited musical legacy, imbued with Menard's own unique voice. He refers to his songs as mood snapshots: "I want the listener to resonate with the same mood I was in when I wrote the song."

Menard has been writing and performing throughout the United States and Canada since the early 90's. A native of Sudbury Ontario, he grew up listening to blues, folk, soul, jazz, reggae and rock. The son of a school board music director, he traded in his ukulele for a guitar and began to perform regularly as a preteen, playing hometown bars long before he was of legal age. At the end of the decade, he formed Cassius King, an acoustic based alternative rock band that toured and parted ways after recording 2 CDs.

Menard now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he recorded his latest CD.