Oh Lord. Please excuse me while I gush.

It is all so personal—how we relate and react to things around us. Thoughts. Sounds. Stimuli unending. Inside and out. So many distractions. Stop! This is about D. C. Anderson. But no. It is always the tree falling in the forest. And what then if the tree falls on you. How to find objectivity in that tangle of branches. Feeling for broken bones. Sure of a broken heart. Again. Thank you, again. Finally, again.

Close Companions, in good part owing to the near perfect piano, bass, guitar and violin (plus additional vocals from some musicians), has the feeling of a song cycle thanks to the glancing minor figures upon which D.C. Anderson’s music, and more so the lyrics, sometimes skate, with not so much figure-eights as much as gentle spirals. And ah, those lyrics—poetry, as they in the best of all possible worlds should be, and a light in the murk as in the worst world they must.

Whether his repeated wail at the end of “Long Past Blue,” written with Geoff Packard, or the entirety of ”What’s Happened Since,” written with Bryce Kulak, and on and on through this paean to human foibles set to truth, his flexible tremulous voice never betrays a meaning; rather like a sudden illustration next to a definition in a dictionary—his interpretation a picture of a word worth a thousand words.

Noah Tree
Cabaret Scenes
December 2009
www.cabaretscenes.org