From busking on the subway to performing at the Cambridge Folk Festival, New York’s theatrical indie-folk group Bandits on the Run have had a remarkable career. Their latest instalment finds them in a revival mode on The Shakespeare Tapes, a collection of six songs inspired by the prose from As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Adrian Blake Enscoe plays the guitar, Sydney Sheperd takes on the cello, and Regina Strayhorn plays the accordion. As unlikely as that configuration might sound, these three singers ignite passions with their vision and verve.
While they use Shakespearean texts in this collection, the music has a remarkable ferocity, especially on the opening track, Tiny Boy, which, featuring a suitcase drum, builds to a fevered pitch. Recounting life’s hardships at various stages, it ends Twelfth Night’s joyful testament to love and marriage, still finding time to look at life cynically: “But when I came to man’s estate/ With hey, ho, the wind and the rain/ ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate/ For the rain it raineth every day.”
A plea to be in the moment, Mistress Mine counter-intuitively builds from a gentle opening with strummed patterns, replicating the increased passion that comes with every moment of waiting. “What’s to come is still unsure/In delay there lies no plenty/Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty/Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
While the three take some liberties with the lyrics to Springtime, the message of love comes through as clearly as the “ding dong” of the bells that ring. Joyfully, like a spring breeze, love is not simply in the air but appears to be present everywhere.
From the cold blow of Winter Wind to the moments when so overstuffed with the Food of Love, there is no room for more. In the hands of Bandits on the Run, this Shakespearean prose, written over 400 years ago, is brought to life for a new generation. The Shakespeare Tapes reveals that true masters never die; they simply get refitted in ways that enlighten a new generation.
You may also like:
