A musical marriage For Keeps in countless ways. Oh the joys past and those yet to come.
The keening hand-in-a-velvet-glove voices of Carrie Elkin and Danny Schmidt are joined on their debut collaboration by Colin Brooks (electric, steel & dobro guitars), Matthew Shepherd (drums), Andrew Pressman (bass), Raina Rose (harmony vocals), Johann Wagner (harmonica), and Chip Dolan/Keith Gary (organ, piano). Plus, there are additional vocals from Pressman and harmonies from solo singer/songwriters Paul Curreri, Devon Sproule and Rebecca Loebe. The sessions took place at FireStation Studios in San Marcos, Tex. Founded on the premise “Carrie sings Danny” and vice versa, last year the duo released Together a two-song, digital download-only single, featuring Carrie’s take on Danny’s “Company Of Friends” and Danny’s version of Carrie’s “Swing From A Note.” Those songs are included here.
This solo-to-duo departure opens with Danny taking the lead on his melodically urgent “Two White Clouds,” an image rich marriage of fantasy and reality wherein multiplication occurs by the close. Opening with mildly distorted electric guitar care of Brooks, the angelic-voiced soon-to-be Mrs. Schmidt replies with her love paean “Echo In The Hills,” with Echo being the narrator. Elkin is adept at embracing emotion while singing, which perfectly complements the foregoing melancholic creation. Danny proposed (marriage) to Carrie in his own “peculiar and awkward way,” by performing a tender and heartfelt new song, during their March 2013 showcase at SXSW. Clarity regarding whether it was actually a proposal was achieved a few days later, and that song – “Kiss Me Now” – opens with, “If my lips can’t make it simple, If my eyes can’t make it plain / Kiss me now but answer me tomorrow,” and later enquires, “Am I still the man you want / Now that I’m the man you know?”
“Company Of Friends” debuted as the penultimate song on Schmidt’s Little Grey Sheep (2008). At the heart of the composition is the stated intention to create a tangible “footprint” during one’s allotted earthly three-score-and-ten. Furthermore, the narrator trusts that, once absent, those friends will offer a “toast to all the things that I believe.” A litany of one-and-a-half dozen such beliefs follows. Elkin has yet to record “Swing From A Note,” and, here, Danny voices the hesitant narrator: “trust is not something to which I’ve grown accustomed / so please, lord, relieve me from doubt.”
Elkin launches the second half of For Keeps with “Took It Like A Man,” wherein uncertainty remains at the forefront of the narrator’s thoughts and is embraced in the enquiry, “What do you do when you can’t decide / Cause freedom only rings till the ringing dies / But staying only stays till the songbird flies.”
Schmidt’s “Sky Picked Blue” also focuses on love, and affirms that once you’re firmly in its grip, “You don’t stand a chance, you don’t stand a chance.” A rollercoaster ride of emotions–yearning, waiting, forgiving and healing–pervade the verses of Carrie’s beautiful melancholy “Longing Moves The Ocean.”
Danny fingerpicks the intro to “If I Need To Know” where, “Like angels with mopeds, or like street punks with wings, Your eyes turn to water while your tongue turns to steam,” and we learn that “it’s the seashore that cradles the sea.”
Where days merge with years and love is haunted by uncertainty and doubt in earlier songs, Elkin closes For Keeps with “Girl In The Woods,” and the positive contention “I am not afraid of the world / with you by my side.” Now that she’s “out of the woods,” the narrator declares a future intention to “soak up the sparks.” You go girl.
http://carrieelkin.com/ and http://www.dannyschmidt.com/ and http://www.carrieanddannytogether.com/ and http://www.redhouserecords.com/
Photo Credits:
Danny Schmidt & Carrie Elkin (Rodney Bursiel)
Danny Schmidt & Carrie Elkin, Kitchen Garden Café, Birmingham – 2nd Dec. 2009 (Folk Villager)
My girl. Kitchen Garden Café, Birmingham – 2nd Dec. 2009 (Folk Villager)
Brought to you from the desk of the Folk Villager.
