Album Notes

In an era of category-based promotion, Stone Soup is on a mission to explode the whole notion that making music is a function of one's genre. They are, as one critic put it, "mega-eclectic." If something piques the interest of this widely versed trio of acoustic musicians, they take it on--they embrace it, inhabit it, make it their own. Then they return it to the world refashioned, reshaped and animated with the Stone Soup spirit. It might be mountain swing, Balkan dance music, blues or something jazzy, a Celtic reel, folk-rock, an Andean melody, outright original stuff--whatever. Their concern is with unleashing the rhythmic and emotional energy contained in great music, which is why the draw so often upon "roots" and "traditional" sources--such depth and strength resides in those bred-in-the-bones styles).

But we're not talking about some giant conglomeration of disjunct styles, like some crazy surreal fruitcake with every fruit and nut in the world stuffed into it. We're talking about the art of drawing together the underlying sympathies of various kinds of music, of putting one thing beside another because each somehow informs the other, sets it off, helps it stand on its own and communicate the message of its soul. One critic has this to say about the Stone Soup CD: "I've rarely heard such a finely crafted folk record that encompasses so much variety and still seems focused in a mysterious, yet familiar way." This is the art that goes beyond the mastering of individual tunes of far-flung provenance. This is where a larger understanding of what music does to us comes into play, of why music is so vital in every place and every time. This is where Stone strives to live, musically.