Green Mountain Suite
Price $12.00
No one captures both the rich celebration and the profound reflections of life than Spencer Lewis’ music; The Green Mountain Suite is patchwork quilt of violin, guitar and B-4 organ sewn together in a sweet tapestry of sound. Common themes with the guitar tuned to Dropped D creates the Suite while each song remains whole unto itself. (The one exception being the damped textures of the second song "Home Inside.")
Many of the songs are borne out of Spencer's live concerts which feature his inventive guitar looping that he performs with increasing confidence and creativity at every gig. Acoustic guitar leads and harmonies are added to his trademark folk/ classical violin passages while a streaming B-4 (Hammond B-3) organ washes over the songs like a river.
The Songs: "The Ballad of Tom French" was written as a loop and appears both in it’s ‘live’ looped form and a studio version complete with drums, organ and lead guitar. (Track 4 is exactly the way Spencer plays it live). It was titled after Tom French the Barnard, Vermont resident who battled Lou Gerhigs disease and starred in the film Mind Games - recently shown at the Green Mountain Film Festival in Burlington. Spencer was writing the song just as he was asked to play at his funeral. "Reverence" features a full orchestration using string samplers and live violin as does "Tinmouth" - the latter titled after the original loop was written onstage during one of his concerts there. "Requiem" ends the CD with its somber yet hopeful tone - somehow the key to many of Spencer's songwriting themes; in this case it reflects the sad strains of friends and neighbors coping with unbearable sadness and grief in a spring and summer of tremendous loss.
Every album reflects many factors that surround an artist: changing technology, the goings on of time and place and the inner changes that swirl inside the human soul. As for looping - Spencer was looping his music before he knew what looping was; he just played the songs through to the end. Now, music technology offers many tools for these purposes and this CD has taken advantage of these offerings. Again, being borne of live performances are the poignant strains of the dropped D tuning that seemed to arrive in daily morning guitar sessions yet appeared in different forms in every instance. These themes - and sentiments are the result - the Green Mountain Suite.
- Ballad of Tom French - 4:22
- Home Inside - 2:33
- June - 4:02
- Ballad of T.F. (looped version) - 3:47
- Tinmouth - 3:20
- Suite - 2nd Movement - 3:13
- Flown Nest - 3:33
- Balance - 6:31
- Original Suite - 3:45
- Reverence - 4:14
- Requiem - 2:55

