Thursday, July 20, 2023

Max Heinegg’s fourteen-song album of poems set to folk-rock music, “Through Traveler"

On "Through Traveler" (2021, available on Bandcamp), poet, songwriter, and guitarist Max Heinegg has composed folk-rock music for fourteen poems, from Christina Rossetti to Cornelius Eady. Many of the poems, from the opening "Song of the Open Road" (Walt Whitman" to the closer "So We'll No More a Roving" (Lord Byron), are in keeping with the album's titular theme of travel, but two tracks take up poems about fathers to create especially haunting songs that travel into the poets' pasts: "Those Winter Sundays" (Robert Hayden) and "My Father's Waltz" (Theodore Roethke). There's also a quick and powerful 57-second version of Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool", with lead vocals by Linda Morose. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 July 2023)

 


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