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Silver Platters, Seattle, Washington
June 2002

by Lisa M. Smith

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Linford Detweiler - 'Grey Ghost Stories' (2001)

I first heard this disc during the season when May crests into June and the air is drunk with chlorophyll. Linford Detweiler's self-released 'Grey Ghost Stories' makes a ballet of the darkness in its title -- though this is not to say the music is frilly or New Age. It is a collection of compositions for solo piano and solo acoustic guitar, recorded in Detweiler's old 3-story home in Ohio of the name Grey Ghost -- simple, familiar and fresh as a green room with white lilies and dancing patterns of light.

As Detweiler (Over the Rhine) describes the contents of 'Grey Ghost Stories', he reaches for darker yet equally gentle imagery, placing the nighttime and early morning shoulder to shoulder with the light of high noon. His thoughts hinge on the idea that "This is the music that gets made at home... It's good to make peace with who we really are when the house gets still".

Detweiler's piano work seems to digest more smoothly (or with more immediacy) than, say, Anthony Phillips'; Having a hint of pop song structure, it revisits themes with the circling grace of a Chopin nocturne, as if merely passing from room to room. In songs like "Rosehips", a jazzy open chord or the slightest bit of "Tom Waits sauce" keeps the music from sounding commercial or cloyingly sweet. These are melodies composed of and by their irresistible chord changes.

When departing from the keys, Detweiler's guitar brings to mind the sleepy intensity of Bruce Cockburn on a breezey slack-key experiment. In no song is the formula separate from the feeling: the wistful "I Forgive You" seems to be crafted from an ache in the throat, and I could easily believe that "Sunday Evening" was born of the light reverence of a good talk with mom (or even God) in the kitchen. The one borrowed piece is Mendelssohn's "Consolation", seamlessly blending into the stitchery of Detweiler's 'Grey Ghost Stories'. Naturally, an old home would not be complete without something borrowed -- even the Grey Ghost.