This page contains a brief overview on the album ANGELA RENNILSON: Close Your Eyes. Learn more about the artist and explore the track lists and website. If you find any information that needs to be corrected, please let us know.

 
Angela...
....grew up in Southern California in a bicultural household where everyone in her family played an instrument. She began learning piano at 8 years and switched to the clarinet and finally settled on the flute at 11. Although classical music was the staple in her early years, she discovered the depth of traditional forms of folk music while living in Germany one year in her early twenties. She took a guitar with her to Germany, and in those lonely, foreign months in her mother's home land, she began to write songs and busk on the street with Irish and German musicians.

After returning to the US, Angela began a circuitous journey through studies in Biology and marine mammal behavior at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Later she moved south to Monterey and became a public radio programmer for KAZU radio with her own ecological issues interview show, Earthwatch and then inherited a show called Rosewood Gates which showcased emerging acoustic singer songwriters. To pay the bills, she entered the trades and became a carpenter, landscaper, fire lookout and finally a massage therapist. It was while living in Big Sur, California and working on a high mountain overlooking the widest pacific ocean, that she began to write some of the songs that would later find themselves in Close Your Eyes. She writes of the songs...

"They are infused with this place, this coastal craggy land, the salty sea, the sage filled air, winding rivers, redwoods tall, grey whales hugging the coves, the ever changing moon and my amazing friends."

Sometime late in 2000, as winter settled into the Carmel Valley barn where she was living with a family of foxes, wild turkeys and tree frogs, she realized she was ready for the challenge of listening to the imperfect nest of her creativity.

Between February and June of 2001 she recorded her "audio painting" Close Your Eyes with cello virtuoso Barry Phillips. His haunting harmonic solos and help with percussion and tampura rise to meet the songs and ask more of them. Roger Feuer, formerly of the folk trio City Folk also came out of retirement briefly to develop the complex weave of guitar and the CD was created.

As she wrote the songs for Close Your Eyes, Angela fell in love with the melodic sounds of Spanish. She was experimenting with Spanish Vocables and melody on the guitar when she wrote the music for Para Mi Corazon. Several years later when she found the poem by Pablo Neruda that fit perfectly with the song, she married them together and a new sound emerged that today she is still exploring.

"There is something about a Spanish/Latino sound that sometimes grows out of a chord progression for me. I feel the words to write are not English. Too angular a language. Too defined. But the poetics of Spanish is like the water on the canvas of a watercolor painting. You load up the brush with paint and touch it to the surface and it spreads out like a river and whispers of a place which cannot be spoken about"

As if life wasn't full enough, Angela found another resonance in her Scottish Ancestry and began to study the Gaelic language and the songs and stories of the Gael. She found ancient fairy songs and stories about the other world that caught her breath. It was then she found the song about a little girl gone looking for her sister who is captured by fairies, and later an oft recorded song translated from Irish into English, Stretched on Your Grave. Wild Swans also came from that time for learning the old songs and the old ways of speaking the world into being. It is a glimpse of the world from the eldest daughter's point of view from the story, the Children of Lir.

From the literary inspiration of Edith Wharton's Ethan Fromm, came Angle of Repose and hidden in between the many lines you will find various references to Angela's long time interest in Buddhism.

"I am always struck by the seeming ambiguous nature of life. I mean, sometimes things seem so clearly defined, but mostly not and when we come to deeply important crossroads in our lives, sometimes the way we choose changes everything forever, and even if we loose everything in that process, we are left with a soul that knows what home is."

Of the eleven songs on Close Your Eyes, seven are original compositions. They touch on longing, listening to the quite voice deep inside that guides us through the "bright and shining" world of today, finding a love that is even bigger than heaven, the blessing of new birth, the rushing river of life and finding peace even in tragedy. Some are haunting, some are upbeat and groovy, some are introspective and poetic but ALL of them are just dang beautiful. With an all acoustic lineup of Guitar, Tabla, Tampura, Congas, Cello and vocals, Close Your Eyes is an international feast and a satisfying one at that!

In August of 2001 Angela entered a graduate program at Naropa University. She moved to Boulder, Colorado to study contemplative psychotherapy, a blending of Buddhist psychology and western contemporary psychology. It was there she let the music that had been such deep rudder for her over many long years move away from the boat of her life. She focused on her work with others and studies which left little time and resources for traveling the creative road.

But, the muse that created Close Your Eyes waited patiently for school to end and finally, it has. Angela now lives in Minnesota and has begun to expand into other instruments and styles of writing. We eagerly await her next recording, but for now enjoy Close Your Eyes. It is a delicious first album for Angela Rennilson, rich in the dichotomies of life and the resonance of finding beauty in the darkest parts of ourselves. Like Angela, the recording reflects the wider world of sound and feeling that she has explored. After four years of a chosen sabbatical from music, Angela is back in the river and playing again. Close Your Eyes is as fresh and vibrant as when it was birthed four years ago. It is timeless!

Track List:
1. Close Your Eyes
2. Bigger Than Heaven
3. Para Mi Corazon
4. Sophie's Blessing
5. River
6. Angle of Repose
7. Justo Antes Del Amanacer
8. A Phiuthrag's a Phiuthar
9. Stretched On Your Grave
10. Wild Swans
11. The Widest

Suggested CDs:

• Katie McMahon
• Caroline Lavelle

Other Genres:

• FOLK: Gentle
• WORLD: Celtic
• MOOD: DREAMY