Album Review: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, and Karine Polwart, ‘Looking for the Thread’
Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, and Karine Polwart have admired one another’s music and songwriting for decades. Two years ago, for the first time ever, they had the opportunity to write songs together during a writing retreat at Kinlochmoidart House. The intimacy of the room in which they gathered provided the just-right atmosphere for the trio to produce a set of warm, introspective, and stunningly gorgeous songs on Looking for the Thread.
The album features two tracks—“Gradh Geal Mo Chridhe” (the opening track) and “Buidheann Mo Chridhe Clann Ualrig”—sung in Scottish Gaelic. Fowlis’ shimmering a cappella lead vocals lead off “Gradh Geal Mo Chridhe,” inviting listeners to accompany her into the spaciousness of the song, and Carpenter and Polwart join her and the other instruments blend with the vocals; the tenderly rendered music feels like waves lapping gently on the shore.
Carpenter leads off the cinematic testimony to love, “A Heart That Never Closes,” with its spiraling instrumentation, while sparkling piano notes lie beneath the transportive vocals of the resonant ballad “Rebecca.” Flute and strings weave around waves of piano float under the somber and reflective title track, an ode to the act of joining with others to “look for the thread” that ties us together. Gentle guitar picking ushers in circling vocals in the exquisite “Hold Everything,” whose transcendent beauty evokes its central message to hold close everything and everyone that is dear to us for we never know from moment to moment what life will bring. The album closes with atmospheric plea to “Send Love” in moments of life’s despair.
Although Looking for the Thread is the first ever collaboration among Carpenter, Fowlis, and Polwart, let’s hope we have many more of these albums. Its beauty and warmth touch our souls deeply, and each song is a many faceted gem of love and hope.
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More information about Looking for the Thread is available HERE
