Ruins & Foundations: Duality Reigns

Lao-Tzu once wrote:

'Yield and you need not break:'

Bent you can straighten,

Emptied you can hold,

Torn you can mend;

Therein lies the theme running through Spencer’s latest album Ruins & Foundations and its title track offers the clearest illustration: light and dark, minor and major, in two keys and two distinct parts, all held together with Jeff Berlin’s river of drums. The viola and mandolin take turns to highlight the spare melodic parts while the acoustic guitar’s fluent separation define its baselines and melodies.

Similar themes pervade, like the ever spacious “The Unraveling,” which signifies an unveiling of a deeper understanding of life juxtaposed to the downward slide that can undermine our personnel existence. The fast paced “Burst” implores the expansion of joy if not an implosion into chaos. “In Full Retreat” is actually a full speed ahead pop melody with fiddles and mandolin while the title reminds us of the need to resist getting lost in the rising tide of 21st century life.

The guitar piece for “Waiting For a Leaf to Fall” was recorded after a meditative hike on my back 40 mountaintop. The searing richness of the Richelieu viola from Vermont Violins, (also used on the title track) follows every poignant turn the guitar makes.

“North of November” is one of Spencer’s folk-rock anthem’s of simplicity. It features another boundless Berlin drum track with the Americana folk chamber sound to honor the starkness and introspection of the season. One of those kitchen sink mixes where everything is going in different directions yet flows into one unending stream.

“Cold Snow” was titled after a backcountry ski sojourn, made more special by gliding over snow in its purest form, pristine, fluffy, and predictable for turning. Touching the earth on skis is a special connection that keeps me grounded and inspired. The song starts with a simple riff played on my Froggy SJ guitar and winds along its groove oriented way. The viola, violin, and mandolin execute the counterpoint and harmonies in the expansive folk chamber music production that personifies this album.

The guitar part for “A Candle for Vera Miles” and its sequel “#2” was a stream of consciousness in four parts. In each there is a pause about halfway through, yet the tape keeps rolling as I play on. Take #2 was recorded only minutes later while in the same compositional space. Both possess a certain 6-string articulation I’ve been searching years for, while the added viola, violin, and mandolin meld into the ambient Americana chamber music accompaniment that pervades throughout. The title was a small way of honoring Vera Miles, the actress who provided understated grace and beauty to many of my favorite films. My favorites are the westerns The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Wichita, yet most know her from Psycho.

“Ramblers Sonata” is one of those anthemic folk-rock pieces with no words, maybe one of the reasons I added some non-word vocals towards the end.

Finally, “Down the Road” is a song I recorded in 2013, after A New Path but too far away from Souls (’16), and subsequently forgotten. The guitar and violin are tuned down a step, highlighting their richness, while the woven violins shimmer over a single guitar loop. The pace and message just seem a fitting way to end this album.

Click the image below for all the links to Ruins & Foundations

Winter Concerts 2020

Winter 2020 Concerts & Club Dates

Concerts in Burlington & Chelsea

Spencer Lewis will perform two solo concerts of guitar & violin instrumentals and songs on January 25th at Congregation Ruach haMaqom  and North Common Arts in Chelsea. The Burlington Concert has tickets at the door while the North Common Arts concert features limited seating and online tickets provided from their website.

Souls - The Inside Story

Souls: The Inside Story

I’ve often said that every album I make is a ‘peeling off of the layers’ so to speak; in this essay I’ll offer to shed some light on the process.
 
Souls encompasses every method I have ever used in my 25 CD catalog in the realm of production, engineering and composition. It began with recordings I made with the inspiration of the moment at hand at my kitchen table with my trusty D- 50 Sony handheld recorder, the same recorder that captured “September One” from Vermont Resurrection,one of my most popular songs on Pandora. These ‘stream of consciousness’ sketches held up for over a year, maybe even two, as I found them to be comforting in times of confusion, or when I wanted my brain to just empty. Often, that is what I need from music, beyond the stimulation or thought provoking reflections playing in the background of my life. After these sessions that yielded the “Grounding” series, it seemed that every time I picked up my guitar in the days thereafter I seemed to flow back into the same musical mantra, which is why the songs “Souls” and “Soul Synergy” are cut from the same cloth. As my liner notes to Souls reveal, four of these original sketches made the final cut for the album as I found it harder to try and recreate the exact feeling in the studio.

I then revisited a song I’d started almost 6 years earlier - "The Eagle Has Flown" and listened to the single violin track that seemed to float freely over the power guitar loop made by my Taylor 910ce-L7. Once I added another violin track, the song just opened up into that cacophony of symphonic texture that seems to magically appear when employing the ‘kitchen sink’ method of mixing (individual tracks played to the guitar parts but with no thought to how they fit together until they are mixed). This is how my earliest albums In the Bosom of the Green Mountains and Gardener’s Rain were made. It contains some of my signature violin phrases where certain arpeggios climb and descend in rapid fluidity, ones that are familiar yet still sit freshly within the composition. "Solstice Porch" and "Crows" emanated from the same meditative recording session but in contrast to the kitchen table recorder, this was a traditional session using white-hot pre-amps and great microphones. These are, of course, similar to the solo guitar work on In Stillness and virtually half of my instrumental catalog. They showcase the magnificent nuances of a Brazilian Rosewood custom made Froggy Bottom SJ with it’s depth of tone and bell-tone clarity.

"Looking Back To Another Now" offers many precise harmonies and counter melodies in this nine minute odyssey. This harkens back to the first songs with composed violin overdubs starting with “Quechee Serenade” from A Sense of Place or “Hands of Love” from Close To Home.

“Red Maple Waltz” contains an engaging guitar part with equally inspired violin tracks. I stopped working on it when an arpeggio danced into nowhere. Although it just needed some extra work,  it just wasn’t the right time - so it sat through the making of four other albums! Sometimes what is needed is focused time and energy that I once took for granted when making a record. Now, with so many distractions in my life I forget that is often all it takes. This winter I was ready to continue composing and it flowed like a river. I mixed the violins slightly lower to allow the guitar’s story to be heard.

In similar circumstances, the “The Knowing” got left off A New Path, I don’t know why as it was on all the early iterations I made for that album in 2013. I guess there was a flaw in the intro section of the guitar part and I may have been going through my ‘flawless’ stage when recording that album and am I glad that is over.

A few more stories to tell: “November Morning Song” was a solo guitar piece from 2007 that I always loved and as my editing skills weren’t as good then, the sound of an alarm clock somewhere in the background always stopped me from releasing it. Then I decided to learn how to play it (a novel idea) and lo and behold, found out the mechanism that made the song tick. After a few simple edits, it begged for a melody line and turned into one of the most satisfying songs on the album. Why one song is mixed only once or twice and others 34 times, I don’t know. “Unknown” was a song that was recorded so serendipitously that I'd forgot I’d recorded it! I recently began working with fretless electric bass player Eric Graham and asked him to add a bass part; then during a session for some other songs, asked drummer Brett Hoffman to contribute. Eric’s bass part inspired me to re-recorded my violins, I mixed it all accordingly and we have an ensemble folk-rock piece like both Vermont Resurrection and the early instrumental folk-rock pieces that were on The Silence Between the Words. “In Morning” was a solo guitar piece that needed a violin part to extend its meditative slowness. “Stonelight Serenade” just came together with the right blend of violins and lead acoustic guitar with a guest appearance by a bird to be named later.

In the making of Souls, I was a witness to the unraveling of the revelations that often accompany the artistic process. Although there are no credits to the liners notes, I will say that my daughter Sage edited them and also came up with this great ending: “Taken together, Souls is a collection that embodies those moments at the kitchen table and in the studio, as they have occurred though the seasons, and across years of wood stoves and open windows, with life changes and souls passing through. “

Calling in the Winter

To my long-time listener's and those who have recently discovered my music on Pandora, Spotify and the plethora of opportunities on the digital pipeline; yer still out there - thank you.

To commemorate my first video from Calling in the Winter, I offer the album as a free download on CD Baby until January 1st. Happy New Year to all.