JR004
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The Healing Sound of Water |
Jill's passion for her music consistently produces a vibrant, luminous and totally joyous integrity. Her fourth solo album, The King's Well, reflects part of her more personal output during the past seven years: she has set numerous poems to music, and written some fine songs which have been moving her audiences in recent concert programs.
Three of the songs are poems that Jill has set to music: The Route March (written during World War One by Australian poet Henry Lawson); La Complainte de la Blanche Biche (a rare French poem of medieval origin) and Aa My Life (by the modern New Zealand/Scots poet Sydney Goodsir Smith). The remaining eight songs are entirely Jill's own, both lyrics and music. Time For Letting Go was written in response to the death of a beloved great-aunt in New Zealand, just three weeks before Jill's planned visit; that trip, her first home in 13 years, inspired The Healing Sound of Water; Jill's most political song to date is Identities (which she describes as "me getting angry and middle-aged"); Racheli is dedicated to the memory of one of her daughter's friends, killed in a terrorist attack in 2002; Come Again, Love is about a Scots friend's fisherman-husband who was lost at sea; Down the Days is a moving meditation on the process of growing up; A Piece of My Heart is Jill's "love song to my family and friends"; and, finally, The King's Well, the title track, was inspired by a passage in a John Steinbeck novel which refers to a story by Hans Christian Andersen.
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