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Shedding ‘Light’ on the subject
February 3rd, 2008
by Andy Graham - Herald Times
Shedding ‘Light’ on the subject
By Andy Graham Herald Times
February 3, 2008
Carrie Newcomer says the benefit of “paying attention” is one theme of her new album “The Geography of Light.”
It seems entirely appropriate, then, that the album rewards close attention from listeners.
And Newcomer’s hometown fans can start being attentive regarding “The Geography of Light” sooner than most folks. The album will be in stores Feb. 12, but Newcomer and her touring quartet are playing an album-release concert Saturday at
Newcomer is already booked for almost 40 dates on a tour stretching into April to support the album, her 11th release on Rounder Records, with more dates to come.
But only some of the shows will feature the band that will take the stage in
“That’s a little different configuration with the strings, as opposed to some past tour bands,” Newcomer said during a Jan. 22 phone interview, “but it’s a lovely sound, and I’m so looking forward to presenting it.”
The album’s sound is varied — with Appalachian and classical instruments augmenting Newcomer’s customary acoustic folk approach — but uncluttered. The deliberately spare arrangements coordinated by Newcomer and co-producer David Weber let the songs’ strengths shine through.
The music is typically mannered and gorgeous, but not without groove. The lyrics are earnest and evocative, open to interpretation but clearly showcasing Newcomer’s progressive spirituality on several levels.
“The album title is allegorical, and this album has a more overtly spiritual nature,” Newcomer said. “Quakers call that universal spirit that moves through the world and lives in all of us ‘The Light.’ So it’s about trying to grasp what is just beyond our understanding, trying to describe what is difficult to put into words. It’s about studying the spiritual part of our lives.
“God can be found in the most common places, and there is a goodness at the center of things.”
Newcomer’s song “Geodes” offers a potent metaphor for that. Common in the limestone belt of
The song “Where You Been” is an entire litany of finding the hidden sacred in everyday places and people.
Pay attention, Newcomer suggests, and you’ll find it.
“Paying attention is something I have to remind myself to do,” Newcomer said. “We’re so busy. We live in a culture that doesn’t encourage us to take time to reflect. We’re bombarded with a thousand distractions every day.
“But we should remember to pay attention, to contemplate what’s important. That’s where your life really happens. That’s where hope happens.”
Newcomer’s political activism is also evident, and the observations expressed in “A Mean Kind of Justice” are pretty pointed: “It don’t ever stop a thing, and eye for an eye, tit for tat. And I’ve never seen anybody truly satisfied by that” and “Oh, no, forgiveness never sleeps, but the devil wants its due and says human life is cheap.”
But Newcomer doesn’t write angry polemics. Friend and author Barbara Kingsolver describes activists of Newcomer’s ilk as “polite firebrands.”
“I have this belief that our most effective activism usually comes out of what we love,” Newcomer said in a publicity interview for the new album, available at www.carrie newcomer.com. “Anger and fear only get you so far, and then you burn out or get overwhelmed. When it comes from what we love, when we focus not just on what we’re against, but what we’re for; then it sustains.”
Newcomer has recently collaborated with Kingsolver and other like-minded artists, authors and theologians such as Parker Palmer, Phillip Gulley, Jim Wallis, Scott Russell Sanders, Holly Near and Bernice Johnson Reagon.
The album’s fifth cut, “Two Toasts,” was written from a Palmer poem. Newcomer has rearranged a couple of songs based upon Sanders’ writing she initially supplied for last year’s “Wilderness Plots” project alongside fellow local songwriters Detor, Tim Grimm, Tom Roznowski and Michael White. The year 2007 also saw Newcomer record a live concert DVD with Near and Reagon, accept a commission to write the YMCA national theme song and compose music for the Indiana Repertory Theatre’s production of “Bad Dates.”
And with the new album and tour, Newcomer’s 2008 promises to be similarly active. It’s an election year, and Newcomer, for one, doesn’t want to see Christianity cast as solely supportive of conservative political policies.
“I travel around a lot, and from more and more people, I’m hearing a growing voice that doesn’t want to put God into such a small spiritual container,” she said. “People are talking about a much more inclusive nature of God, a spirit that moves throughout the world. We hear a lot from one segment of the spiritual community, but it doesn’t speak for all of us and doesn’t speak for me.
“We should speak the truth as we perceive it and, as a writer, I don’t have anything to give the world but the truth as I know it. Anything less than that rings pretty hollow.”