Customer Reviews

Sweet Dreams of Home

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

 

 

All of the songs on this CD are about "home," and that has started some very interesting conversations in our house with our older kids. The younger ones just love the music, but so do the grwonups! How do they do it? I love this woman's voice. She is amazing! All three CDs are great!

All of Robertson's CDs are wonderful. She has an amazing voice, that's for sure. Why isn't she very very famous? She also always picks songs that make you think and appreciate your life and your loved ones. This one is all songs about home. Couldn't be better!

Mae Robertson appeared in a folk concert series I'm involved with a while back. She is every bit as warm and engaging in person as her recordings would suggest. She has assembled here something of (what used to be called) a concept album. All the material, as others have noted here, is related to the theme of "home," at least in the broadest sense. Some are well known Baby Boomer standards, including Karla Bonhoff's "Home" and Graham Nash's "Our House." These would pretty much seem to be de rigueur selections. But Robertson and collaborator Eric Garrison have done their homework and come up with lots of less well known--and some quite surprising--numbers. How many acoustic performers would even consider doing a Talking Heads' song. Robertson and Garrison pull off the avant-garde rockers' song beautifully and with only minor textual changes. It's a total recasting of the song, less ironic, more heartfelt. And it works.

Eric Garrison provides solid vocal and instrumental support throughout. And Tom Paxton shows up to provide guest vocals on his own composition "Home To Me (Is Anywhere You Are). A treat. And a sign of the kind of respect Mae has earned among the folk cognoscenti.

The "home" on a couple of the tracks, Arlo Guthrie's "I'm Going Home" and Dougie McLean's "Until We Meet Again" is more metaphorical. There's nothing new about referring to death as "going home," I suppose, but these songs are still beautiful expressions of a universally held notion. They are no less profound for being a something of a commonplace.

Mae's direct approach to her vocals makes for a style both lovely and grounded. She is a no-frills vocalist (refreshing in this day and age). This is really a well done album of well-crafted, intelligent songs. And did I mention "lovely"? Yeah, well, let me re-iterate: it's just lovely.

I agree with the other reviewer that this recording is a slight disappointment, but it is worth owning. I do like the song selections on this one very very much and of course, I love her voice. The songs are all about home and they are really very sweet. The last one is a gem. Also, DO NOT SKIP the new one, Stone by Stone! It is her best yet. Repeat! Buy Stone by Stone!

Mae Robertson's first two CD's (All through the night and The sun upon the lake is low) were so terrific that I gobbled up this one and assumed it would be more of the same.

Not so. The voice is still terrific, but the song selection just doesn't make it somehow, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because Don Jackson wasn't apparently involved in this one, as he was for the first two.

Now she has a fourth CD too, again without Jackson, and the snippets I heard of it at Amazon all left me cold. I'm not going to order it.