Thea Hopkins – Love Comes Down
Self Released – 13 July 2018
Love Come Down, the fourth release from Boston, Massachusetts, based singer-songwriter Thea Hopkins, is a high-class CD, offering great variety in just six tracks.
A member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, and a 2016 recipient of a fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, to whom this album is dedicated, Thea’s ancestral heritage also includes Nottoway (Iroquois), African-American, Portuguese and Irish. Her breakthrough came in 2004 when Peter, Paul and Mary recorded her Jesus Is On The Wire, and since then, in addition to recorded offerings, she has performed live on both sides of the Atlantic.
Whilst her first two releases were very much in the contemporary folk music mould, and the third, Lilac Sky, was, in her own words, ‘Native Americana’, Love Come Down pushes the sonic envelope and boundaries further with a highly judicious use of trumpet and flugelhorn, violins and piano that seamlessly sweep the listener into different realms, whilst at the same time leaving the impression that this is very much an acoustic album.
Album opener, Love Come Down, a gentle entreaty, has an ethereal quality, as violins, electric guitar and brass interweave behind Thea’s sultry, soulful voice.
The aforementioned Jesus On The Wire evidenced the fact that, lyrically, Thea was prepared to boldly address injustice, in this case, homophobic hate-murder. The Ghost Of Emmett Till once more shows her willingness to confront sensitive subjects. In 1955, Till, a 14-year-old black boy was murdered for whistling at a white girl, an event which proved to be a catalyst in black American Civil Rights history. There is also a pleasing congruence in the fact that Noel Paul Stokey, the ‘Paul’ from Peter, Paul and Mary, also provides harmony vocal and guitar on this moving, and ultimately pessimistic song, an evocation of a particularly dark aspect of the American landscape.
‘The Tallahatchie River where he was found
Those waters are still rolling, and they feed this ground
You can get away with murder, in this country still
If the boy looks like Emmett Till
The ghost of Emmett Till walks across this land
Still waiting for America to take his hand’
Third song in, Mississippi River, Mississippi Town, a brooding, slowly smouldering number ponders on the levee breaking and releasing the full force of the eponymous river and features the electric ebow of Dave Minehan, which eerily suggests a premonition of what would be the devastation and resultant creation of a ghost town.
Tim Ray‘s superb piano features throughout the disc, but is exemplary on the beautifully haunting Almost Upon A Time, which again features the melancholic horn sounds of Tom Halter on what appears to be an intensely personal song.
Tamson Weeks is another personal track, which, in addition to Hopkins’ delightfully sonorous voice, highlights some quite sublime violin playing from Mimi Rabson. The subject matter here is Thea’s great-great aunt, a medicine woman of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard, and this 2018 song is one of three on the E.P. copyrighted 2018, the others being The Ghost Of Emmett Till and Tamson Weeks, whilst the remaining three come from 2016.
The disc ends with a lullaby, Until Then. Brilliant in its apparent simplicity, it draws on many of the best attributes of the CD highlighted above and its all too brief 2 minutes and 29 seconds is a near-perfect way to end the collection
‘Until then, close your eyes and rest your weary head
Go to bed and dream tonight
As the moon flips on its light
Know that my love will never end.’
Whilst Thea Hopkins may not be groundbreaking in terms of redefining a style or genre of music, if her aim is the thoroughly laudable aspiration of seeking perfection in her song-writing and performing, then Love Come Down takes her one step closer to this goal and, in terms of albums, is the pinnacle of her recorded output so far.