Album Review – Where You Are by Murray Wall – Jonie Mitchell – Leo Kottke

[singlepic=8,150,110,web20,right]Album Review: Murray Wall – Where You Are

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From the outset you know that you are going to be listening to an album with presence.
This man has talent that wraps itself around your ears and takes you on a journey of 9 superb songs.

From the title track “Where You Are” to the instrumental “Storm Song”, the talent of this man oozes from the CD through the CD player and into my ears.

Think of Leo Kottke, Nick Harper or Michael Hedges with edges and then add another to this class of musician, Murray Wall.
On this album you can hear a competent musician, a man of thought and feeling who addresses issues close to his heart.“WHOLE NIGHTS JAMBOREE” and “FRIENDS” are both songs about finding some clarity amongst the confusion and complexity of relationships while “PEMULWUY” and the funky groove of “WICKED MOB” are both songs about the environment and the indigenous inhabitants of this ancient and beautiful country we live in, something Murray a committed environmentalist, holds dear.

He has a preference for writing instrumentals like “STORM SONG”, “PLATEAUX” and “OFF THE RAILS” because he feels they say more emotionally than songs with lyrics.
When writing instrumentals Murray explains he doesn’t have to deal with the limitations of words and can explore the world within the song in a more open way.
“It’s rather like a magic pudding that the trick is knowing when to stop, when the piece is written”, he says.
He often doesn’t know what a song is about until after it is written and given a title.

“WHERE YOU ARE” is basically a song about the exorbitant use and waste of fossil fuels.
One day while caught in a traffic jam and feeling deeply depressed about the amount of pollution being pumped into the air about him, Murray watched the other motorists being oblivious to the fact and he thought “Where are you?”
In this song he expresses the anger he feels towards those greedy few who profit from causing so much damage to the world we live in and the excessive waste of making more and more cars, exposing the mentality of our ‘throw out one and buy another culture’.
He has a wish that everybody would stop buying cars and see how we go with what we’ve got.
Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

Murray tries to find humour amongst the myriad of things that can bring us down about how we treat each other and the world.

He admires the philosophy of W.B. Yates, a revivalist of the Gaelic language during the nineteen thirties who said “You’ve got to tell it from where you are” and that, he says, is where the title for the album came from.

Murray Wall is a man of thought and empathy who feels him self to be a topical songwriter and he has addressed certain issues close to his heart on this album that spans the best of twelve years of song writing.

This is a superb album from a master of the guitar enhanced with a lovely voice that blends beautifully with his guitar style.
It will remain on high rotation in my music collection for a long time to come and should grace the collection of any serious music lover.

Murray Wall. Remember this name for he is a man full of talent that I hope to hear more from in years to come.