Album Notes

Do you know the Lorelei? Someone, who, like the mythical Siren of the Rhine, lures you with mesmerizing song to foolish acts and emotional upheaval. If you do, and subscribe to the philosophy that it is better to have loved intensely and shipwrecked than to have never loved at all, songwriter Mary Morton has crafted an original and often hilarious collection of songs to help you celebrate the continuing search for an ideal love.

If you adore the scintillating, shimmering confluence of language, melody, and plangent harmony of some of the best songs from the 1920’s and 1930’s, like those of Cole Porter or George and Ira Gershwin, Morton’s witty word play ingeniously mirrored by unexpected melodic turns, will be a delight for you to hear and sing. “C’mon and hear!,” to name three of my favorites, the samba exuberance of “Karalyn,” who is the world’s sexiest sexagenarian librarian (“Move over, Marian”); the gutsy honky-tonk shuffle of “Distract Me” with the wordy but appealing protagonist who plaints “I’ve a long and sordid history of spoiling what there is/By obsessing over what has yet to come./Full aware although I am of this confounded tendency,/How to terminate it I have yet to plumb;” and the quietly searching, tenderly chromatic, “An Odd Fit.”

Expertly accompanied by Julie Spangler (piano), Tim Berens (guitar), Doug Richeson (bass), and Jim Rupp (drums and percussion), Morton performs her songs for all lovers, lovers of the English language, and singers (those who “sing out” or those who just sing in the tub), an exciting musical homage to the Lorelei in your life.