Strange Conversation
Rarely has a songwriter joined forces with such a distinguished array of collaborators, as New England's Kris Delmhorst shares credit for this material with the likes of Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, George Eliot, E.E. Cummings, and Rumi. Yet never do these adaptations from poetry (and some prose) have a whiff of academic stuffiness about them. To the contrary--the album could be appreciated as much for its musical range as its literary inspiration, as Delmhorst transforms the Whitman passage she titles "Light of the Light" into exuberantly Beatlesque pop, matches Eliot with a Dixieland brass section on "Invisible Choir," gives Cummings's "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town" a ragtime playfulness that evokes memories of the jug band era, and turns the rousing closer of Rumi's "Everything Is Music" into a spirited campfire singalong. She adapts her voice to fit the material and the arrangements, from the breathy intimacy of "Since You Went Away" and the languid torch song "Tavern" (which draws as much from the style of Peggy Lee as the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay) to the edgy, wiry rock of "Water Water."--Don McLeese