Though all folk singers tell stories; few are capable of creating the unique landscape performed by Australia’s Grand Salvo. His music reminds us of childhood books on tape, records of Peter and the Wolf, and landscape paintings out of the most richly illustrated picture books of our youth. Taking pages straight out of Frog and Toad or Watership Down, “Death,” Grand Salvos’ 2008 album, tells the story of a bear and a bird, as well as some other forest animals through a year in the wilderness. The seasons are painted with an acoustic mood simultaneously simple and lush, cycling between the harp-driven motif of spring and the winter songs colored with acoustic lament.Through the voice of the narrator, we drawn to a wilderness characterized by a serene sense of wonder. Pulling us from our beds, the narrator calls us to hear the story with the simple “wake up, it’s time to go.” And just seconds later, “Opening” erupts, first with harp and a simple acoustic melody and then Paddy Mann—Grand Salvo himself—draws us in with the characters: “running side by side keeping up with bear a rat and a rabbit,” and the scene “in the light of dawn…running down to the river side.” He’s quick to remind us of our childish transgression, sneaking away from beds from which “parents them gone.” “Death” draws upon senses of innocence and wonder coterminous with danger and transgression, as if to say that we cannot think of love without death, nor joy without fear.
In the third track, Grand Salvo takes on the perspective of the wanderer-hunter Shaelem Relagh who finds himself crossing a river on a tree we heard fall in the second song. He comes face to face with the bear and fears his death. If an album like this is made to remind us of childhood feelings of the wonder of nature, Shaelem Relagh is its epitome. Grand Salvo blows up the moment of the hunter’s first interaction with bear, and in doing so harkens back to our first experience of the wild. “Shaelem Relagh” is humble, driven by harp and given color by a briskly tapped piano key. Yet as soon as the chorus arrives, at the very moment when Shaelem decides to first cross the river, the guitar joins, triumphant and bold against the subdued background formed with primary simplicity and quiet. The chorus comes in a second time without lyrics just after Shaelem had waited to be crushed by the bear, then opened his eyes to find the tree slipping off the bank, saved, for a moment.
There is a sense within the forest painted by Mann that animals in the forest share a common, secret experience into which Shaelem trespasses. Take the relationship between the bird and the bear: first we hear of their love—the companionship proudly sung in “Bird Loves Bear.” Their love culminates in “Bird”, where we hear of the death and reincarnation of the bear, coming back as a fish after his death by the frozen winter lake, and the bird’s mourning. Though “he’s a fish and I can’t be with him,” he bird concludes, “I’ll wait here for you, at this great ocean’s edge, ‘cause next time you’ll be a bird the next time that we meet.”
In this way “Death” is about cycles. Seasons turn upon seasons, animals die and return, and trees fall and provide passage to the other side. There is, maybe, some moral lesson we can take from the landscape Grand Salvo paints of nature and its disturbance, but I prefer to read the album with a formal eye. It is through the gentleness and simplicity of the music that the story becomes principle to the listener. “Death” reminds us of our first memories of wonder in the face of nature.
Grand Salvo has yet to make inroads in the US, but I firmly believe that he will soon become a presence in American folk music.
[DBK]
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