Last year, Eliza Gilkyson took the bull by the horns to deliver an album (2020) that promoted “…unity, commitment and action during this epic and critical showdown of power versus people in the USA and our world today”. On her latest album, while it shifts away from socio-politics, she follows appears to be following a similar visceral impulse, one that is born of a love of a land and its people. Songs From the River Wind is described as her love letter to the Old West.
Songs From the River Wind is composed of snapshots of the people and places, lives and loves lost and found over her years of wandering the West as a musical minstrel, searching for her heart’s home. The album will be out on January 14, 2022, on Howlin’ Dog Records.
Inspired by memories of characters and events that birthed her enduring love affair with the West, the songs span 40 years — from originals to vintage classics — and culminates with her recent decision to relocate permanently to Taos, where she is sinking down deep roots at long last.
With a nod to her dad, folksinger Terry Gilkyson and his 1950s folk group “The Easy Riders,” who recorded original and traditional folk songs with a distinctive western flavour, Eliza joined forces with her old friend Don Richmond to produce the record, enlisting Don’s much loved Southwest band “The Rifters” to sing backup harmonies.
“The ‘Rifters’ are like the twenty-first century version of the ‘Easy Riders,’” Eliza says. “My dad would have loved them, and to have them sing and play on this record with me is icing on the cake. It’s all part of bringing these disparate parts of myself together and bringing my past into my present as a songwriter and as a whole person. It has been an enlightening adventure for me.”
Don and Eliza went for the kind of western/folk sound that highlights her love of storytelling and true blue characters, her love of the rivers and the mountains, and her joyful return to the high desert plateau “at the foot of the Mountain” she now calls home.
Eliza quotes the Irish poet George Moore, who said, ‘A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.’ “The same can be said for this woman, a wanderer who loved the road and the music life but who was always hoping to find her true home in the world,” she says.
Songs From the River Wind is the story of that quest, the lives and loves, the people and places in her beloved West, and the river of longing that brought her to the place where she could finally rest her bones and feel, with certainty, that she was home.
Alongside the album’s announcement, she reveals the album track, “At the Foot of the Mountain”, on which she shares a deep love of her mountain home and paints an attractive pastoral vision for these weird times we live in. She conjures a time when things were far simpler – a life shaped by the land, where life carries on as it has done for generations, living in homes built of mud and sand, gathering apples and harvesting corn.
For more information, go to https://elizagilkyson.com