Strange days indeed: these years have brought us torture, wire-tapping, and a patriotism based on wearing lapel pins, shopping, and ignoring the constitution. Fear (or just the fear of fear) has made our thinking flat and closed and has perverted our national decision-making into something unrecognizable. We resign ourselves to powerlessness and fall into the arms of the strongman. We wait for answers to fall out of the sky. We keep our defiance safely contained to our blog screens.

 

Or we remember to make some noise. We reclaim our own sparkling power and responsibility, and remember to seek the truth, to protest, to create a real future individually and collectively, and to dream.

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Light of Mine is 11 songs from the past 35 years that explore these notions of power and fear. The band is the critically-acclaimed “Rosetta Trio”, featuring double bassist Stephan Crump and guitarists Jamie Fox and Liberty Ellman. The songs are: Backdrifts, by Radiohead, American Skin (41 Shots), by Bruce Springsteen, Starman, by David Bowie, Insatiable, by Jen Chapin, Into the Mystic, by Van Morrison, Everybody is a Star, by Sly Stone, Born in the USA, by Bruce Springsteen, Sunny Sunday, by Joni Mitchell, Nobody Told Me, by John Lennon, You Haven’t Done Nothin’, by Stevie Wonder, Lullabye, by Jen Chapin.

 

The DVD (live) performances are: Little Hours, American Skin (41 Shots), Me Be Me, Into the Mystic, Sunny Sunday, Passive People, Manchild, Nobody Told Me, Scream Laugh Cry, Strip it Bare, Go On, You Haven’t Done Nothin’, I Could Fall

And videos: Let it Show, Election Day, Backdrifts

Political subtexts aside — or are they front and center? — this album is a groovefest, a playground of spirited dialogue, passionate expression and forward momentum.

 

Produced and arranged by Stephan Crump with Jen Chapin
A Papillon Sounds production
Recorded August 2007 by Peter Rende and Stephan Crump at The Butler Plaza Brooklyn NY
Mixed by Stephan Crump at The Butler Plaza
Mastered by Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound NYC