Cahalen Morrison & Eli West
“There’s a natural language of American music that flows from a place where strength and tenderness meet; a place up on the mountain where the forces of nature are striking, where rock juts up into the open world… yet where life clings with a reflective vulnerability – like the tiniest seed of pine finding root on that rock – that reveals, perhaps, a greater strength. Cahalen Morrison & Eli West bring us many vivid tales from this place on the Holy Coming of the Storm. I imagine them inhabiting that windblown but inspiring land and carrying down their discoveries – prayers, love songs, tunes full of quiet joy – by the wagonload.
Cahalen and Eli’s music evokes a brotherhood of the road that transcends the relatively short time they’ve been touring together. The two came together as adults in Seattle at the encouraging of famed Bluegrass DJ and musician Kevin Brown, who sensed a similar depth in each of their approaches to acoustic music. Eli was instantly drawn to Cahalen’s old soul approach to songwriting, and Cahalen to Eli’s affinity for unpredictable harmonies and syncopated rhythms. Their musical relationship grew over the course of six months and they began touring as a duo in the spring of 2010.
In deciding to capture this intense period of expression with The Holy Coming of the Storm, it was fitting that the pair work with Matt Flinner, whose mandolin has consistently defined the open, toneful sound of western Bluegrass music and whom Eli counts as a foundational musical inspiration. Working with Matt in Aaron Youngberg’s Swingfingers studio allowed them to delve into their reflective spirit – the sounds are captured with both an intimate closeness and a sense of air. One can hear the feeling of the moment in every ringing tone. The three-day live tracking process included not only producer Matt on mandolin, tenor guitar and bouzouki, but also Eric Thorin on bass, Ryan Drickey on fiddle, and Aaron Youngberg, who engineered and played 3-finger banjo on one song. The material is primarily original, with “My Lover Adorned” being the very first collaboration between the two. The classics “I’ll Not Be A Stranger” and “Kingsfold” (with the same melody as “The Star of the County Down”) round things out with the timelessness of tradition.
Cahalen and Eli bring us the great musician’s willingness to hold things back, to keep the tension strung, to cherish the beauty and not let it all out at once, like the balancing of heat and cold in the highest western mountains, where the days are dry and dusty and full of the smell of pine but the nights are cold and crisp and find you wanting to get next to a fire in a cabin, burning wood that crackles, that is part of you – one piece of wood makes the worn neck of an old banjo and one ends up in the fire, one ends up in a log cabin wall and one ends up split in two by lightning. And so go our hearts – Eli and Cahalen sing about all of it. No note is left unreflected upon. They understand that when it comes to music, we are all on the receiving side, even when we are the ones playing it.
It takes a certain drive to declare that you have something to say; but it takes something else, a willingness to explore the depths of your emotions in a different way, to have something worth saying. On the Holy Coming of the Storm, you will find both of these qualities delivered in ways that ring through long after the notes have stopped.”
Dirk Powell
December 2010
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