REDBIRD is both the name of an album and a loose affiliation of three American songwriters that began to take shape during a common tour experience. In January of 2003, KRIS DELMHORST, JEFFREY FOUCAULT, and PETER MULVEY did a run of shows together in England. Thanks to excellent routing, they found themselves with a few hours at a hotel every afternoon, and without fail they engaged in an off-the-cuff song circle. (Nighttime after gigs was reserved for poker.) Across the tour, they discovered musical affinity and a shared love of a fairly diverse spectrum of Americana.
It was a no-brainer to do a record, but in keeping with the spontaneous nature of their original sessions, they did it in a living room, around one microphone, in three days in August of 2003. What emerged is a love letter to the body of American song. The members enlisted the talents of multi-instrumentalist David “Goody” Goodrich, and became multi-instrumentalists themselves. The bulk of the record speaks from the common tongue of music: traditional tunes, old jazz standards, country songs, and things that blur the line between those forms. Kris and Peter also swapped covers, backed Jeffrey on one of his originals, and they all lent their instrumental skills to a Goodrich composition. There are also a handful of songs by contemporary writers who are well entangled in the great briar patch of this music.
Track List:
- Ships (Greg Brown)
- Moonglow (Irving Mills)
- Patience (Mark Sandman)
- Buckets of Rain (Bob Dylan)
- The Whole World Round (Jayne/Stuart)
- Ithaca (Peter Mulvey)
- Lovely as the Day is Long (Paul Cebar)
- Moonshiner (Trad)
- Redbird Waltz (David Goodrich)
- Lullaby 101 (Kris Delmhorst)
- I Gotta Get Drunk (Willie Nelson)
- Lighthouse Light (Ry Cavanaugh)
- You Are the Everything (REM)
- Down by the Sally Garden (Yeats/Trad)
- Redbird (L. Baltimore/Trad)
- Drunk Lullaby (Jeffrey Foucault)
- Hold On (Tom Waits)
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