Album Notes

No Depression Sept/Oct 2006:
"The back story for this enchanting debut is all about words, about how singer and principal songwriter Mark Ray Lewis was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and how he won an O. Henry and a Pushcart for his fiction. The images in his songs, from kingfishers and caves to ploughshares and holy ghosts, are plenty evocative, and loaded with spiritual and existential freight. Yet ultimately it's the music that lingers-- a parched, creaky take on rustic verities done up in pump organ, pedal steel, tuba, cello, banjo, and piano. It's a burbling, oompahing wheeze that seems to be groaning, even the gauzy he-she harmonies, with the rest of creation. Pregnant, too, are lines such as, "Floss my soul Esparanza" and "We are math/We are math/ We are a length of cold water," words that portend volumes but beguile as music." --Bill Friskics-Warren *******************
The Alibi:
"Singer, songwriter, fictionist Mark Ray Lewis grew up the son of a country preacher in Hannibal, MO. Lewis' family, which included his gospel-adoring mother, Betty Jo Lewis, who released her own 8-track in the '70s, cultivated in him a profound respect and love for music as well as an irrepressible spiritual consciousness... Lewis' guitar and lead vocals are joined by cello, trombone, tuba, violin, banjo and pedal steel in what amounts to a subdued yet powerfully melancholic flirtation with folk-alt.country destiny. All of the pieces fit together into an intimate sound that is both experimental and exact. If a bit surprising, the instrumental combination blends with surprising precision, and Lewis' narrative lyrical style sheds light on his passion for the printed word." -- Simon McCormack