MP3 Barbara Toothpick and Alan HorseRadish - Maine Songs From a Different Head

Original songs and stories that grew from living in down east Maine through the revolution of the 1960's and 1970's.

44 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Power-folk, FOLK: Political



Details:
So Alan said, "We should record the songs on CD's"! And Mark Knox who owns New Sound Recording Studio said "Come on up to the 20th floor and lets get them down."

If you were lucky enough to be on the East Coast, you might have heard us sing these and other wilder art performances pieces.

Don't be fooled. These are not make a million-hit the charts songs. They are little explosions of sound words that came from living day to day in this crazy world.... Trying to make sense out of the senseless things we homo sapiens do to and with each other on this breathtakingly beautiful planet earth.

I looked in all the notebooks, dredged my song mind for the tunes rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed some more, remembered and wrote the stories and rehearsed and rehearsed some more, but you know how that is.

And here they are. Stories and songs of the revolution of the 1960's and 1970's as we lived it in down East Maine.
Think of music with stories ...
Think of music played by everyone, not just the musically trained.
Think of the 1960's when dreams were lived...
Think of living day to day in the most beautiful place on earth.
Think of independence, freedom, exploration, failure...
Think of living with someone, fighting, loving, growing, raising two kids....
Think of making a school, building land trusts, forming groups....
Think of the dream of changing the world to a better, fairer place...
Think of music played with sticks, stones, and wood around a campfire...
Think of magic land where real becomes too real and the stars glitter...

Think of two people, me and Alan trying to make sense out of a crazy world where supposedly peace loving people wage war against everything and everyone.

That is where these songs and stories came from. We bought a house and drug our two kids off to live on a tidal river where we lived as close as we could in order to stay free of the pulls of society. We created things, Alan is a painter and i paint, write poetry and sing these songs. As they popped out of my mouth and demanded attention, Alan picked up his harmonicas and joined my auto harp and me in filling our lives with song.

The songs are bits of living in a special time. The first one is "Sitting by the River" And that's where a big bunch of them were written, me sitting in our Maine house, on the window seat I had built out of scrap lumber, looking out and down at the shallow tidal river that lapped the cedar posts that held the house up from falling down into time.

My favorite is "When you get Freedom, Who Will You Be?" That was the big question. To suddenly have no one telling us what to do when. To have to think out what we wanted and why and was it for good for all of us, or bad for most.

And then there are the shout songs,
"Its My World Too!" and "Fuck You Mr. Johnson";
---the extolling the wonders of the earth, "Come Walk in the Garden with Me" and
"You've Given Us a Beautiful World Lord";
---the proud women songs, "We've God the Right..." and "Atlanta was an
Argonaut";
...the love songs; "I Shouldn't Love You Like I do" and Spring Seems To Be Here
Again";
And More and More and More.......

Each song spilling out from living through the many days of wonder and pain, confusion and certainty.


So I say to Alan, Thanks, Kisses, Passion. You were right to set us down on the path of putting these songs into a form the you out there can share. They sing out the spirit of two lives, struggling through. Beyond that, doing these two (soon to be four) CD's has continued and intensified the conversation Alan and I began the moment we met and will continue until we both die.

Alan HorseRadish : Abstract watercolor painter, singer, player of odd and wonderful instruments.

barbara toothpick:: singer-songwriter, acrylic and watercolor painter, poet.