Over the Hedge (excerpt)
Dream Dance (excerpt)
Beautiful Wound (excerpt)
Wasteland (excerpt)
Heart on a Shelf (excerpt)
We Carry On (excerpt)
Goin' Home (excerpt)
Spiral (Excerpt)
Visit music.nymphya.com to access your free download of “Dream Dance.”
You never know from where inspiration will spring. This song is one of those cases.
I had been reading this incredible book “COLOR” by Victoria Finlay which is a perspective and travelogue about the origins of color.
I was drawn to the book because of my own painting, and my discovery that the master painters I so admired used to make their own paints. (Versus me, who just buys them!)
The very first chapter of the book is about the color Ochre, and the Aborigines. I became consumed with her story of how much their art focuses on depicting their Dream Time.
Most people express their creative impulse in the world through children, and work, and building empires. Artists express our creative impulse in the world with our art, which becomes our children, and our empires.
“It is one big dance” I said to myself. ” . . . A Dream Dance”.
I contacted my collaborator, Gentry Bronson, and spoke with him about my insight, asking him if he would write some lyrics for me.
When I read his lyrics, I was immediately taken with them; he had captured exactly what I wanted to express simply, precisely, and beautifully.
The melody came immediately, in a flash. I then set to work recording and laying in the percussive elements, focusing on sounds that would evoke a primal sense; Bodhran drums, scratching sounds (which in my imagination were the sounds of the Aborigines scratching and drawing in the dirt), floor Toms, kick drums, and cymbals.
The long, sustained string lines over the earthy percussion were inspired by my love for Dead Can Dance, and how their music seems to call up ancestral memories held deep within our DNA. For this song is all about ancestry, Time, Life and creation. Once we fly “Over the Hedge” and are born, we are all called upon to create and procreate. It is our destiny.
Then I wove in the banshee and operatic cries, which were to me the sounds of the land and human spirits that echo in the winds, down through Time. . . Like the echoes that we all are, performing in our grand Dream Dance that is our Life.
As with most of the songs on this CD, I turned to my bassist and mixing master Ray Schaeffer for the bass sections. We worked together on producing the driving rhythmic, fretted bass parts that give way to the lyrical, fretless bass lines at the end of the song, and that which the whole point of our Dream Dance of Life is really all about:
