Kindred Rhythm
2006
Mightier Than The Sword
About This Album
For his 29th album, John McCutcheon, always a voracious reader, exercises the literary side of his music by collaborating (either directly or through inspiration) with various contemporary authors, including Barbara Kingsolver, Lee Smith, Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Carmen Agra Deedy, and Sister Helen Prejean, to create this quiet, reflective, and occasionally powerful suite of songs. McCutcheon rounds things out by setting to music poems by Pablo Neruda and Jose Marti, and also adds melodies to two Woody Guthrie lyrics in which the original music was lost. The end result is a concept album of sorts, one that outlines the ability of good literature to inspire music, but it really moves better as an album if one forgets that construct entirely, for a song's genesis and pedigree is a good deal less important than its ability to work in the world as a memorable moment in time, and a good song is one that moves the listener to want to repeat that moment in time over and over again. How many of the literary hybrids here actually do that? Well, enough, actually, to make this thing work more often than it doesn't. The opener, "Our Flag Was Still There," written by McCutcheon with Barbara Kingsolver and drawn from one of her essays, is a powerful indictment of the perversion of patriotism for political aims, and if the melody is a bit pedestrian and the message a tad pedantic, it really has to be in order for the song to work, and it does work.
Track List (try tracks 1,3,4,7 and 8)

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