Sony Legacy
2007
Blue Alert
About This Album
Anjani Thomas has been writing and recording since the 1980s after graduating from the Berklee College of Music. A skilled jazz pianist, her break came from her mentor, Leonard Cohen (who she has been working with since 1984), when she sang on "Hallelujah" on Cohen's 1985 Various Positions LP and was such an integral part of his 2004 recording, Dear Heather, where she sang, played keyboards, and co-wrote two of the songs. On her Blue Alert Columbia debut, Thomas co-wrote and/or finished previous fragments of his unpublished poems, lyrics from songs, and pieces in his notebooks and journals. He produced the album. The result is a sultry, smoky, spiritual record, where flesh and heart are not separate entities but intertwine and whisper together. The record begins with a soft yet pronounced exhale and a piano chord by Thomas, and she sings, "There's perfume burning in the air/Bits of beauty everywhere/Shrapnel flying/Soldier hit the dirt/She comes so close you feel her then/She tells you no/And no again/Your lip is cut/On the edge of her pleated skirt/Blue alert." It's a song of desire run amok and the disappointment of that desire thwarted: "It's just another night I guess/Another night of nakedness/You even touch yourself/You're such a flirt.
Track List

Disc 1

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Disc 2

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