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Carrie Newcomer and Geography of Light Voted Folkwax Best Album and Artist of 2008
February 5th, 2009
Folkwax Magazine announces its winner of the 2008 Artist and Album of the Year.
Carrie Newcomer!
By FolkWax
Carrie Newcomer
Photo courtesy of www.rounder.com
The readers of FolkWax, the largest subscribed weekly in the singer-songwriter genre, have selected their FolkWax Artist of the Year 2008 and FolkWax Album of the Year 2008. Through the month of December readers and contributors nominated artists and albums for a final ballot of five artists and five albums and then for the past few weeks you voted. As the largest subscribed weekly publication in the genre (and one of the largest, period!), these awards are open to more fans than any other awards in the genre. The final ballot for FolkWax Artist of the Year was:
Fred Eaglesmith
Carrie Newcomer
Tom Pacheco
Pete Seeger
John Stewart
What a stellar group of some of the best singer-songwriters in the world! We congratulate each one for being nominated. With record voting in both categories again this year, you have selected Carrie Newcomer as FolkWax Artist of the Year. Newcomer has continued to impress with her heartfelt songwriting and performing.
I'm sure we will hear more from Newcomer in a future issue of FolkWax.
Congratulations to Carrie Newcomer!
As with the Artist of the Year Award, the nominating process for FolkWax Album of the Year 2008 began back in December when our readers and contributors began making nominations. The nominating process created the final ballot of:
Beautiful World - Eliza Gilkyson
Buena Vista - Robin and Linda Williams
The Geography of Light - Carrie Newcomer
Tinderbox - Fred Eaglesmith
Trouble In Mind - Hayes Carll
These were all great nominations and it was nice to see that you recognized artists from across the spectrum of singer-songwriters. The staff of FolkWax congratulates each and every nominee for the recognition that our readers have made of your fine work. But in the final voting, again with record returns, you selected Carrie Newcomer's The Geography of Light as FolkWax Album of the Year.
This marks the second time that Newcomer has swept the FolkWax awards! She adds the 2008 awards to her 2002 sweep. Congratulations to Carrie Newcomer on an outstanding 2008!
Carrie Newcomer's The Geography Of Light
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Here is a reprise of Founding Editor Arthur Wood's review of the FolkWax Album of the Year, The Geography of Light by Carrie Newcomer (FolkWax rating: 10):
The Geography Of Light was recorded at Airtime Studios in Bloomington, Indiana, and the collection was co-produced by Carrie Newcomer and studio proprietor David Weber. It's their third consecutive collaboration and in total Newcomer's eleventh solo release (excluded from the head count is the soundtrack CD that accompanied initial copies of Newcomer's in-concert video The Age Of Possibility/Live At The Indian Theatre [2000]).
It seems appropriate at this juncture to mention Hugh Syme's widescreen, almost surreal artwork. On this occasion, Newcomer's lyrics furnish rich portraits of how humankind traverses night and day (and other borderlands), so it's appropriate that Newcomer should be standing by the margin of land and sea, a location from which, during the inevitable hours of darkness, seamen are guided and reassured by those structures that emit cyclical, magnified light. And on the left margin of this panorama stands a lighthouse. Overhead the daytime sky appears dull and stormy, while a shaft of vivid, heaven-sent light strikes the ground in front of a smiling Newcomer, in the form of a large multi-paned window. To the extreme right, in the far distance stands safe refuge - a two-story family home - while to Newcomer's right, loaded with risk and uncertainty, plates spin precariously on thin rods - two such plates are visible, but there's the possibility that more lie beyond the limits of this scene.
As for duration, this song collection tops fifty minutes, while the fourteenth and closing song is listed as a "Bonus Track"...and for good reason. One that will eventually become apparent...
Last week I reviewed Beth Nielsen Chapman's album Psalms and it included a track titled "This Life That's Lent To You." Adopting such an approach to life in The Geography Of Light, Newcomer takes the listener on an exploration of the garden of delights - natural and manmade - in which we dwell, and then for good measure contemplates the beyond. "There Is A Tree," the string- (acoustic guitar, violin, banjo etc.) and percussion-driven album opener possesses a rootsy Appalachian feel. Lyrically couched in the first person, the narrator reflects on her connection with the spiritual, offers the bare-to-the-bone insight "I've always lived inside my head/And often utterly alone" and adds the self-deprecating "I'm the fool whose life's been spent/Between what's said and what is meant."
"The Clean Edge Of Change," based on a poem Newcomer wrote after reading Parker J. Palmer's Let Your Life Speak: Listening For The Voice Of Vocation (Jossey Bass, ISBN-13: 978-0787947354, 1999), reflects on how we overcome problems that crop up in our life journey and concludes that resolution is best achieved by proactively working one's way through the problem. Night and day, light and dark, and heaven and hell are all mentioned in "A Map Of Shadows," as Newcomer waxes poetic with "It's four in the morning, the last dregs of the evening/I sit and rock on the front porch swing, 'til the morning sky starts bleeding." The lyric also references those devilish 'no beginning, no end' graphic creations by twentieth century Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher. It appears that, geologically speaking, Indiana is littered with geodes, rocks that outwardly look plain and ordinary, but when broken open reveal intricate crystalline structures. Assuming that you possess an awareness of America's contemporary Folk songwriters, Newcomer's "Geodes" - "miracles clothed in the commonplace" - fulfill as sacred a role as the (ten-pin) bowling ball cruciform in Kate Campbell's "Heart Of Hearts."
"Two Toasts" is a lyrically reworking, with musical setting, of one of Parker Palmer's poems that praises the mystery that unfolds between us humans each and every day - "To Words and How They Live Between Us... To Us and How We Live Between the Words..." With "Where You Been" Newcomer envisions the second coming, the venue being Chicago not Jerusalem, while the humble donkey is exchanged for a gas-guzzling "borrowed El Camino."
Last year Newcomer and four other Bloomington-area songwriters participated in the nineteen-song Rosehill Records release Wilderness Plots, a work that captured in verse (and melody) episodes from Scott Russell Sanders' 1983 short story collection of the same name. Based on fact, Sanders' stories painted portraits of life in what is now Indiana over the period from the discovery of the Ohio River through to onset of the American Civil War. Newcomer reprises her frontier tale of loss and longing "Biscuits And Butter" and it's presented here in a longer form supported by electric instruments, while, set to an up-tempo melody, based on another Sanders story she delivers the steely portrait of "One Woman And A Shovel." Where "A Map Of Shadows" focused on the transition from night to day, "A Mean Kind Of Justice" draws our attention to the fine line that separates vengeance and justice and takes as its maxim the Gandhi quote, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Newcomer launched her solo recording career over a decade and a half ago with Visions And Dreams. In the ensuing years her vision has become pinpoint sharp and she has actively drawn attention to the work of evangelist/political activist Jim Wallis, writers Philip Gulley and Barbara Kingsolver, and musicians Holly Near and Bernice Johnson Reagon. In addition to the latter and others I have already mentioned, in most instances she has also collaborated with them in public performance or as a co-writer. For me, "Leaves Don't Drop (They Just Let Go)," co-written with her Seattle-based friend Mike Mains, is the latest chapter in an ongoing song cycle that has given us "My Father's Only Son," "Three Women," "Amelia Almost Thirteen," "The Rooms My Mother Made," and more, and yet this new creation also works in a universal context. If only for their own satisfaction and to keep their fans on their toes, artists consistently reference or reassess erstwhile subjects, albeit viewed from a fresh aspect and "Leaves Don't Drop (They Just Let Go)" displays the thought processes of a mature woman who has lost parents and whose own offspring has now reached adulthood.
"You'd Think By Now" finds the narrator shaking his/her head after learning, for the umpteenth time, one of life's lessons. While "Where You Been" obliquely approaches the subject of faith, "Lazarus" - "the one that he raised" - reflects on this biblical character's life post the miracle. A book by James Hollis that, paraphrasing Newcomer's words, "characterized our journey into adulthood and beyond not as a 'crisis' but rather as a 'passage'" was the inspiration for "Throw Me A Line." By way of confirming that she's a million miles from a finger-wagging, scowling, "Now listen to me," purse-lipped schoolmarm, Newcomer closes this superb collection with the lighthearted, amusing, and slyly worded (Bonus Track) "Don't Push Send," a cautionary tale that reflects upon the speedy delivery of electronic mail and the art of "pausing for a moment and checking the text and the named recipient(s) before hitting send." The moral, act (even re-act) in haste and repent at your leisure, appears to apply.
Many songwriters peak three or four albums into their solo career, but Carrie Newcomer broke that mould a while back and has consistently topped her previous efforts. The Geography Of Light screams that yearend it's a shoe-in for FolkWax Album of the Year, as Newcomer is for the Artist title. I'd say both are cast-iron certainties...and if there is a whit of justice in this world, a February visit to Los Angeles next year would be the real and fair reward.
Arthur Wood is a founding editor of FolkWax
Congratulations to Carrie Newcomer on a very successful year and on winning the 2008 FolkWax Artist of the Year and 2008 FolkWax Album of the Year. And thanks to the thousands of readers of FolkWax for turning out in record numbers to vote for your favorite. You have spoken!