Verve

Today I spent several hours listening to recordings I hadn't really listened to in years. I started with Woodkerne, a band I played with from the late 1990s into the 2000s. One recording led to another. Pastures of Plenty. The Old Copper Plate. Ireland’s Green Shore. Calliope House. The Musical Priest. I remembered arrangements I’d forgotten I remembered. On Pastures of Plenty, when Paul sings “the water runs down,” I play a little descending scale on the violin. The water runs down and the fiddle runs down with it. I’d forgotten about that. On The Musical Priest, Paul does something harmonically that puzzled me for years. Instead of resolving where I expected him to, he goes to the IV chord. I didn’t figure out what he was doing until years later when I played the guitar part myself. All I knew at the time was that whatever he was doing made it incredibly fun to play fiddle over. That’s music. Then I went further back. I listened to Maple Ridge, the bluegrass band I played with fr...