The Shadow Mountain Fae

Description

Tracks on Shadow Mountain Fae:

O1 Dinas Emyrs
Dinas Emrys, the Fortress of Merlin, was the Celtic equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. In a dream, I stood upon that hill and drank from the Well of Wisdom. The faeries at Dinas Emyrs were the original Shadow Mountain Fae

02 Shadow
Love song for my wife of 20+ years. She’s Shadow the Fairy of the Shadow Mountain Fae because she has the magical ability to disappear…usually when I’m looking for her! bit of a Neil Young influence on this one.

03 Hoodoo Granny
Nothing like a mountain party on Hoodoo Granny’s farm…when I lived in the Appalachians I knew quite a few hoodoo grannies…then I married one.

04 Crybaby Holler
Almost every town seems to have some version of ‘Crybaby Holler’ or ‘Crybaby Bridge’ where teens go at night and listen for the distant cries of a baby. I grew up near one in Abbeville, South Carolina myself.
Once I was reading that back in the days before abortion, parents of unwanted children would abandon them in the woods and say, “The faeries stole them.”
Not only is it abominable that parents would do that to a child, it was more than a bit unfair to blame the faeries for it.
This song is for all those lost children.

05 Inside
Too many of us are indifferent to the destruction we’re doing to the planet. There is no Planet B. I’ve often wondered, in this throwaway society, what’s going on inside of us? Do we treat Mother Earth as disposable because sometimes we feel disposable ourselves?

06 I Went Another Way
OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqEBukezrcY
The acoustic version of this song was released in 2016, but this song wasn’t finished with me yet. It seemed to need more, so here’s the remix with a full band.
The original version was written when I was undergoing difficulties with the fundamentalist Christian members of my family wanting to estrange me, my wife, and my children for our Pagan ways. As I’ve performed it over the years, I can’t tell you how many times people have told me of their own experiences with family members turning them away because of their religion.
This song is for anyone who went another way in pursuit of their dreams and visions.

07 The Shadow Mountain Fae
In the mountains of Appalachia, I have stepped outside of time where years pass as a day. On my first visit to the Cascades, I had a similar experience. This is a song about my first visit with the Shadow Mountain Fae.

08 Banshee
A rocker for all the metalheads. This song is a bit heavier than the rest of the album. If you’ve ever encountered a Banshee, you’ll understand why.

09 Wayfaring Stranger
Being a native of the hills of the Carolinas, I grew up with this song. People who know me know that I follow a Norse-ish path. One of the names for Odin is “The Wanderer.” In other words, Odin is a “wayfaring stranger.” I’ve always liked this song, in spite of its Christian origins. So I made a slight revision of the lyrics to reflect my own beliefs.

10 Shady Grove
Another Appalachian folk music staple, about a lady who is, for some reason, called “Shady Grove.” With a name like that, she was bound to be included on an album about the Shadow Mountain Fae. In my mind, “Shady Grove” is a decidedly fairy-like name, hence the inclusion of this song on the album.

11 Dancing by the Fire
An instrumental piece. Sometimes, late at night, when the rest of the camp has gone to bed down for the evening, but while the embers of the fire are still glowing, the faeries and I dance…