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.
