This first album, "Lifelines", is the culmination of the last 10 years, and exists purely from the love and support of said family, friends and fans. Local Seattle graphic designer, Aaron Rutten, of surrealpixelstudio.com, provided the beautiful artwork; Audio Engineer and good friend Ryan Rood, recorded, mixed and mastered the songs; Jessie Abbott, Nick Sandy, Nelson Barnard, and Bryan Fabert provided their sweet voices and musical talents, and every single person who has found the time to come to one of my shows and cheer me on is the inspiration for me to take this album and its awesomeness, and do it all over again, but even better!
I love you all and hope to keep you singing and smiling for another quarter-life and beyond! <3
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MoE bewitches us with her intelligent, thoughtful lyrics, reminiscent of Ingrid Michaelson accompanied by a soupcon of jazzy blues evocative of Kate Melua, while managing to forge a style definitively her. You’ll likely be smiling and clapping or snapping and crooning along to her infectious joie de vivre. She has an uncanny ability to give an effervescent feeling to otherwise weighty subjects. Oftentimes, one doesn’t realize what an enormous impact her song has had until long after the last note. She draws emotions like sucking poison from a wound...when you weren’t even aware that you were injured.
She has an incredible talent for harmonizing, so that she is able to make you believe you are listening to a room full of people when in fact all that talent is bottled up in one person (though sometimes two people, when accompanied by her twin sister, Jessie). The Djinn genius unleashed in songs such as "Chiaroscuro" or "Summer Rain" cannot be contained once let free. Drawing from such divers sources as Khalil Gibran’s, The Prophet, sea chanteys and Greek mythology, MoE has given us a lot to contemplate in works such as "Perdition" and "The Krakan's Song". She follows that heady fare with charming songs such as the prose-like "For the Love", imparting encouragement with the lyrics “for the love will carry us through, through the painful times that we knew. When the seconds in life don’t feel like enough, what we do, it is all for the love”.
Of course I would be remiss if I neglected to mention her humorous offerings. Just the first few vampy bars of "Trouble" and we know we’re in for some. "Tea Break"? How could that song not be epic? MoE is a perfect listen for those rainy nights huddled in a blanket with some tea, those twilit hours keening for that nameless something and for days of sunshine with the top rolled down. Who could ask for more?
- Elizabeth Beck (Americanogig)
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