The songs of Lewis & Clarke are medicinal, meditative, and trance-inducing. They wind along lengthy lines of chamber folk, full of bows and bells, aphorisms and dreamy dreams. Both literally and figuratively, Blasts of Holy Birth is about being born and re-born.
Conducting the folds of nylon-string guitar, harp, keyboard, horns, strings, and drums, is Lou Rogai, the voice and vision, with arms of friends draped in the name Lewis & Clarke.
Rogai is a pastoralist, a rat-race expatriate, an old-soul musician who chose to live more deliberately with his family under the eaves of mountain trees in Pennsylvania’s Delaware Water Gap. It is a community distant to the big city’s pace, but close enough for gigs and recording sessions with his city-folk colleagues. Among them are Russell Higbee (harp, keys) of Man Man and Eve Miller of Rachel’s (cello) who, too, embrace the exploration of sinewy eastern melody and unaffected compassion called Lewis & Clarke.
In Delaware Water Gap, one can tune in to vibrations that only exist in certain areas. It is here that Rogai, with his wife, took to nest in an antiquated dwelling within earshot of an historic jazz landmark: tuned in, turned on, and just far enough away from the rattle of the rest of the world.
Blasts of Holy Birth was written not with the usual pen-in-hand love-lost scribbles that song scribes commonly sing; here are celebrations, hand-in-hand, of life’s travails and joys!
Lewis & Clarke songs are long and unhurried life lessons, believed and still unveiling truths, to himself and his son, who was months away from LIFE: Day One while this album was being composed. The only piece here not written by Rogai, “Comfort Inn”, is by his friend, Aaron Ross, the CA mountain dweller and singer of Hella. Ross was awaiting the birth of his daughter during the same time that Rogai expected his son, and so it only fit that they share in each other’s song.
Over the last few years, Lewis & Clarke have toured and performed with Isobel Campbell (Belle & Sebastian), Blur, Robyn Hitchcock, Joan of Arc, Okkervil River, Mi & L'au, The Places, The Black Swans and other contemporaries.
And as is the case with good artists and smart adults, it is through big change and artistic redemption that we re-learn who we really are. And as the meat of life is inseparable from the weight of song, Lewis & Clarke’s heavy-duty beauty, Blasts of Holy Birth, is born.