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Red Heart the Ticker
Latest release: “Your Name in Secret I Would Write”
Who: The Vermont wife and husband folk duo of Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons, who for their latest album decided to revisit the traditional folk songs Robin’s grandmother, Margaret MacArthur, had collected and recorded for Folkways Records. The couple recorded in Margaret’s 1803 farmhouse in southern Vermont, often setting up their instruments in the very room where Margaret had passed away in 2006.
What they’re saying: “Plays out like a lament to those who have passed away…[and] a thank you to the landscape.” – You Crazy Dreamers
What we’re saying: As tastefully rendered by MacArthur and Gibbons, who mix in the occasional electric guitar but otherwise stick to traditional instruments (acoustic guitars, a homemade banjo, a viola, an old pump organ), these songs are at once ancient and modern, archetypal and deeply personal. Death is always close at hand, but so is love and the dry humor New Englanders are famous for; “Single Again” is a housewife’s lament so tart and sardonic it could have been written yesterday, and “Carrion Crow” is the kind of morbid nursery rhyme kids love and adults misguidedly try to shelter them from. A quietly stunning masterwork. – Andy Hermann
Official website: http://yournameinsecretiwouldwrite.blogspot.com/
Listen: Red Heart the Ticker - "My Dearest Dear”
