Caroline Shaw & So Percussion - Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part

 

Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part is an album of songs written and performed by Caroline Shaw and So Percussion. With Shaw on vocals and So — Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting — filling out this new band, they developed songs in the studio, with lyrics inspired by their own wide-ranging interests: James Joyce, the Sacred Harp hymnal, a poem by Anne Carson, the Bible's Book of Ruth, the American roots tune "I'll Fly Away," the pop music of ABBA, and more.

The musicians, who have known each other since their student days, were presented with three days of gratis studio time and decided to experiment with ideas they had begun putting to tape during the sessions for their January 2021 Nonesuch release Narrow Sea.

The new album is co-produced by Shaw, So Percussion, and the Grammy Award-winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift).

Shaw, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her vocal composition Partita for 8 Voices, written for and performed with Roomful of Teeth, makes her solo vocal debut with Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part. The lead single "To the Sky," takes its lyrics from Anne Steele.

"I love the songs about death, and going home, and looking toward a time that is better or brighter, which, if there's one thing to think about in the world, maybe that's the thing," Shaw says. "This one I love in particular. There's a line, ‘Frail solace of an hour/ So soon our transient comforts fly / And pleasure blooms to die.' It's meditation on the ephemeral, and I love it."

"I hadn't written very many songs, but I have certainly loved many in my life. I've been thinking of making a solo album for seven or eight years, but it takes having the right friends and community in the room," Shaw says. "The prompt for all of us was: What would we make in the room together with no one person in charge, like a band writes in the studio?"

1. To the Sky

2. Other Song

3. Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part

4. The Flood is Following Me

5. Lay All Your Love on Me

6. Cast the Bells in Sand

7. Long Ago We Counted

8. A Gradual Dazzle

9. A Veil Awave Upon the Waves

10. Some Bright Morning

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