Customer Reviews

All Is Well

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I heard 'Little Satchel' from this album on the radio and had to track the cd down and it was worth it. The plaintive singing of these old songs accompanied by the restrained playing overlaid with Nico Muhly's absolutely contemporary orchestrations makes for a sublime experience: at times restful and at other times unsettling yet always beautiful. Highly recommended.

One reaches to think of how to describe the complement of raw and sophisticated music brought together on this album. Sam Amidon's voice & folk repertoire feel like a rough-hewn cherry wood centerpiece on a table of sterling settings. Like Frodo against a New Zealand backdrop. I have to echo reviews that call All Is Well "headphone music" (yes! in the tradition of, say, Nick Drake, early John Martyn, Iron and Wine) & that say it makes the public domain private again. But the production and Nico Muhly's arrangements also deserve the attention of fans of Steve Reich, or Bjork. You know how Bill Frisell has been taking old time music seriously into a jazz idiom? Amidon & his buddies do an even more ground-breaking thing with avant-garde orchestral music. Check it out.

Amidon has something that sinks deeper for me than many performers -- a connection not necessarily to the lyrics and narratives themselves, but to the act of singing that pulls me in -- entirely. He's an artist, and this CD is a work, that I'm eager to have people to discover and experience.

So Beautiful...unbelievable. You [should be] be swept off your feet. Unassuming, musical [maybe the worst singer you'll hear, yet the most musical at the same time]. Don't be put off by the yokel approach, it is wonderful. Creative lyrically, and melodic and surprisingly rhythmically. This is great music.