Album Notes

These songs and stories from down east Maine, komPleeeT the taleS of barbara toothpick and Alan HorseRadish’s escape from NYC ........escape from their narrow
city lives to a different world they helped create.
The story?........so there we were for ten years, poor,alone, with two kids,trying to reshape our lives.Cold, fighting with each other, at odds with the people we thought of as our community, in a strange environment, learning to be creators. These songs and introductions tell the story ........kitchen songs, car songs, dark of the moon songs, laughing songs .........all as real as the lives that spawned them.
Most were written then,all emerged from that time. ........and the music grew too. From the thin sound of the first two C. D.’s, i, barbara, figured out what i think music is ........ SOUND SCAPES ........like the pictures we paint. Large splashes of sound sprinkled with dots of black, soft breezes of shhhhhhUHsh, strange swells of
wind, background for a small lonely song. Sound Scapes ........the way the human voice is reduced in the forest to one squeak of sound, or merged with the clang squeal shreeeeeeeK of city streets. Not tonal, no formal structure, just Wilhelm Richard Wagner’s swells and
retreats of sound surrounding the tiny defiant voice.
For more of the WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE HOW WHY
of barbara toothpick and Alan HorseRadish look at
what i wrote for the first set of CD’s, Maine
Songs From a Different Head. You can also
look at our web page at, www.toopik.com.