Chris Root - Spider on a Leaf (2023) Hi Res

Over the last twenty years, singer-songwriter and itinerant traveler Chris Root, whose latest album Spider on a Leaf is being released on Team Love Records, has been on an actual journey, the old-fashioned kind. He first surfaced in the early Oughts with the sunny pop of AM 60 – a trio of two Frenchmen and one American. After a sojourn in Rio de Janiero, he formed the bossa nova-inflected Mosquitos, fronted by his soon-to-be wife Juju Stulbach and multi-instrumentalist John Marshall Smith. His work has always occupied the sunny side of the street: good-humored, flirty, romantic. Yet Chris will readily admit that behind the scenes he’d been wrestling with some serious demons.

For Chris, the past few years have been “a journey out of darkness…into a divine light.” He embraced the tenets of the Santo Daime religion, which emerged from the Brazilian Amazon nearly a century ago and has traditionally used Ayuhuasca, called daime, as a sacramental drink in its ceremonies.

Root’s new song emerged from these ceremonies: “In the daime we don’t write hymns, we receive them. I don’t sit and toil over them. They come fully formed, usually after I do a ceremony. Sometimes I’ll receive a word during a ceremony, like ‘seed’. When I get home, I put pen to paper, and they just come out. It’s really amazing. It’s a direct connection to the infinite field, Mother Nature.. whatever it’s called.”

Chris recorded Spider on a Leaf with his longtime producer Scott Hollingsworth at Scott’s studio, Golden Curve, in Roscoe, New York. “Spider on a Leaf” is bewitching soundtrack to a happier, more hopeful, future-facing life, a journey that he’s inviting us on. Put on these songs and go.