Search - Linda Lewis :: Lark

An All Time Favorite

David Nason | 07/24/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This a great record. I've owned it since it first came out on LP more than thirty years ago. Message to WEA: Do us all a favor and issue the CD in this country. Its one of the best recordings of its time and sounds as good as ever."

Indelible Artistry

Geneve Gil | Austin, TX | 05/21/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I grew up with "Lark", and miss it terribly. (I've spent years seeking a cassette or CD version of this long-lost LP of mine... for less than $60, used!)



I don't know anyone familiar with Linda Lewis, and, until I discovered her myspace page today, I had never heard any of her other work. Quite simply, this one album imprinted itself on me for a lifetime.



Every now and then, I look her up, and today, I found a review of "Lark", with the following remarks: "No longer a wild weapon that can soar from childlike lilt to screaming dog whistle without a moment's notice, she channels her range to the emotions it demands, an economy most noticeable on the folky `It's the Frame,' which finds her accompanied by her own guitar alone."



I hadn't known this, that she had been a wilder river-rafter of soundscapes, before "Lark".



Yet, one of the reasons I resonated so deeply with her music was probably precisely because of that capacity she had, to lead me through landscapes of sound I'd never imagined. She could, all on her own, express both concept and emotion in a multiplicity of musical `tongues': timbres, tonalities, personalities, moods, textural qualities, lyrical incarnations.



She sauntered, vocally, with eerie grace, from gutteral, gravelly, tense, or sharp, to soaring, soulful, celestial, or even compellingly fragile. She also tossed surprising drops of pure sugarcane juice right into gritty passages.



In moments, she was totally accessible, as if she were right in front of me, on an empty, rural, red-dirt shortcut between farms miles apart, talking like she would to her best girlfriend, or herself: unguarded, from the gut, earthy and visceral... occasionally even in plain words, abandoning melody altogether. Then she'd swing me into a luscious, concert-hall-filling entrancement of soaring lyricism, or wrap me in harmonies as rich and sumptuous as a sudden, lavish spill of sunshine, resplendent after the chill of a damp grove dense with shadows.



Sometimes she went the other way, starting with subtle, watercolor lusciousness--entrancingly silken swathes of lulling, melodic layers--and leading me, through labyrinthine (yet somehow natural) transitions, into dissonance, moaning, tension, fragments of pathos... and back again.



She was, alternately: curious toddler, spooked child, wonder-drunk adolescent, soulful intuitive, hard-luck sophisticate, sensual siren, frank truth-speaker, romantic visionary, attention-seeker, humanitarian, realist, optimist, cynic, dance-catalyst, political commentator, spiritual bliss celebrant, human nature critic, lover, dreamer, and woman of incontrovertible wisdom beyond her years or generation. Sweet, sharp, deep, whimsical, substantive, translucent.



But, as the review says, she did all that with elegant restraint. She was understated, as if offering her listeners only selected tendrils, filaments, from her secret, wild, infinite interior. Somehow, her voice conveyed an underlying, contained power, to rise wildly above the banks of the enticing musical rivulet she was winding us through, in that album.



I found that album irresistible and inexhaustible, perhaps in part because of its flirtatious intimations of what was withheld, tantalizing the palette suggestively, as a few fine grains of potent, wholly unfamiliar spices can transform a meal into a seduction.



















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