This was our debut concert, and the first time any of us tried to give a concert with a group over Zoom. It was also the first time I made a 4-channel recording of a group performing live. Considering those challenges it didn't come out all that badly.
You can listen to the whole concert, or play each track individually. The tracks don't include the intros (transcripts in the track list). The whole-concert tracks have been edited to remove (most of the) glitches, bursts of noise, etc., so transitions may be a little rough.
| 1 | [ogg] | [mp3] | Riverheart (Naomi Rivkis / Ray Phoenix) |
| (Introduction by Naomi) One morning, a decade or so ago, I woke up with the remains of a very strange dream in my head. It involved a man named Zeb, a miner in the Black Hills gold rush, who had fallen in love with a river... and there were two lines of verse so clear and precise that I had to look them up on the Internet to make sure that I wasn't remembering them from somewhere. Since it turned out that I wasn't, I set about writing the rest of Zeb's story. It's called Riverheart. | |||
| 2 | [ogg] | [mp3] | Ship of Stone (Don Simpson) |
| (Introduction by Steve) I fell in love with this song the first time I heard it, and I've often told people that I think it's the best filk song ever written. It finally won the Pegasus it deserves, in 2019. This is Don Simpson's Ship of Stone. | |||
| 3 | [ogg] | [mp3] | Inherit the Earth (Savitzky) |
| (Introduction by Steve) A few years ago -- well, maybe a decade or so ago -- I heard Naomi sing "Riverheart" and told her that I wanted to add it to our repertoire. She was skeptical, because she'd only heard me sing quiet songs -- like "Ship of Stone". She asked whether I thought I could sing with enough "bite" for "Riverheart". This was my answer. | |||
| 4 | [ogg] | [mp3] | The Rambling Silver Rose (Savitzky) |
| (Introduction by Steve) When I wrote this next song I was thinking of Cindy McQuillin's songs of spaceships, spaceport bars, and hard-drinking, independent-minded women. Also, the name Colleen and I thought up for her new mini-van, Rambling Silver Rose. | |||
| 5 | [ogg] | [mp3] | Lock-Keeper (Stan Rogers) |
| (Introduction by Naomi) Way back in the 1980s, I heard an Australian performer cover a song by a Canadian folk singer whose name meant nothing to me at the time. Fortunately, it wasn't very long before I learned all about Stan Rogers, and of course lots of his songs are performed all over the place... but I still don't often hear that first one I ran into. So we do it. This is Lock Keeper | |||
| 6 | [ogg] | [mp3] | Lord Of the Buffalo (Dave Carter) |
| (Introduction by Magpie) This is one of the songs I grew up on – the kind you hear so often as a child that you could hum it in your sleep, but barely remember the lyrics. It's also the kind of song that always makes me want to stomp my feet, and possibly fight something. I think that probably explains a lot about what I was like as a kid. This is Lord of the Buffalo. | |||
| 7 | [ogg] | [mp3] | Bells of Norwich (Sidney Carter) |
| (Introduction by Naomi) One of my favorite heroes was a woman who saw her country devastated by civil war and the Black Plague, who lived in sickness and isolation for most of her life, and who still taught her entire world that love and joy yet exist, and always will. We don't know her real name, but she's commonly called Julian of Norwich, after the church where she lived in a cell in the wall. This is her song. | |||
We were going to include Eyes Like the Morning as an encore, but we ran a couple of minutes over as-is.