superdumb supervillain: Blue Clouds- Elizabeth Mitchell and You Are My Flower
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Thursday, December 06, 2012

Blue Clouds- Elizabeth Mitchell and You Are My Flower

I don't like to pigeonhole Elizabeth Mitchell as a children's artist, even though I first heard her mellifluous voice on the kid-centric album Catch the Moon that she made with Lisa Loeb. Her voice is clear and true and timeless. Transcendent. And certainly not just for kids.

Mitchell's last few albums have been released by Smithsonian Folkways, a record label more associated with field recordings than pop charts. Her last album, Little Seed, a compendium of Woody Guthrie's songs for children, has just been nominated for a Grammy award.


Blue Clouds features a mixture of original songs and covers of classics by David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison and Bill Withers. I was especially excited about the Bowie cover, "Kooks," since it is from one of my all-time favorite LPs, Hunky Dory. Mitchell's rendition is less of a rollicking romp and more of a dreamy call to action. Hendrix's "May This Be Love" is just gorgeous. Actually, the whole album is like a warm hug. Or a bath. Happy and cuddly and full of promise. The title track is the last song on the album and was written as a lullaby to Mitchell's daughter Storey who now performs with her parents as part of You Are My Flower. Which seems both perfect and inevitable.


In accordance to the FTC Guidelines and the WOMMA Code of Ethics, I am disclosing that we received a CD to facilitate this review. No compensation was provided for this post. All opinions are, as usual, entirely my own.


2 comments:

  1. I like your description of a warm hug. That sounds really nice to me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I love this album, including Kooks (it's Soren's favorite, along with Hop Up My Ladies). You describe it so perfectly.

    ReplyDelete

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