Martha Scanlan - The River and The Light (2018)

- Appeared on Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour, NPR's World Cafe Next, Mountain Stage - Touring the US beginning in mid-October - National Press campaign to begin in September - Americana & Folk Radio campaign underway Martha Scanlan first gained national recognition for her songwriting at the prestigious Chris Austin songwriting contest at Merlefest in 2004, where she won awards in two categories. With the Reeltime Travelers, she was featured on the soundtrack for the film Cold Mountain, produced by Grammy Award winner T-Bone Burnett. Since then she has collaborated and shared the stage with a variety of roots musicians including Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Levon Helm, Ollabelle, Ralph Stanley and Norman and Nancy Blake and members of Black Prairie and the Decemberists. In Martha Scanlan’s fourth recording, The River And The Light, there is this pause right before the music kicks in. It occurs like the deep breath in right before a sigh, or the brush of sand against the bottom of a boat being gently pushed into the current. What follows is a journey, and in this day and age of Spotify and playlists it is rare to find a recording compelling enough to be taken in to such a journey. There is a sense of aliveness and wonder throughout each song and throughout the album. Her song Little Bird Of Heaven was the centerpiece of celebrated American author Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name. All of this while inhabiting and writing from some of Montana’s most remote landscapes. The current one is swept into on the opening track "Brother Was Dying" is pulsing with rich electric guitar tones, somehow lush and spare all at once, the tension of so many opposites- hope and despair, intimacy and expansiveness, birth and death, weaving seamlessly in and out of each other in one winding pulsing groove. It was the first take of a song Martha had just finished writing moments before. “I think it was the only take,” she laughs. This is not unusual for them. Anyone familiar with Martha Scanlan and Jon Neufeld’s unique alchemy on stage will not be surprised by the sense of being taken into the moment- their shows are in themselves a journey of improvisation; the way Jon Neufeld’s brilliant guitar playing weaves effortlessly around Martha’s timeless songwriting is simply magical. This magical alchemy is at play here throughout The River And The Light. The addition of haunting old time fiddles and Cajun accordion of celebrated roots musician Dirk Powell and Black Prairie’s Annalisa Tornfelt seem to invoke something deep in the American psyche in songs that are already layered with the complexity of belonging; this is a journey of the times we are living in. Jon Neufeld’s production on this album, his ability to add layers and depth while maintaining this sense of everything happening in the moment, is masterful.