Hold up, roll on, be still, breathe in

In March of 2023 I wrote a song one evening. I don't remember how it came to me - often my late winter / early spring mindset and motivation are looking forward to more light and warmth, so that was probably on my mind. I remember sitting at my kitchen table with only a Ukulele, pen and paper, and thinking up and refining four verses in pretty short order.  The song Hold Up doesn't have any people or human things in it, just four images of things in nature being themselves.  A tree, preparing its buds and growing towards the season when they'll open; a river, just flowing on and around obstacles the way rivers always do; a mountain, just quietly being part of the earth through all weather; and finally, all the buds, birds and whales that breathe the same air you and I do.  There are no kids asking funny questions, no parents clumsily trying to understand their kids, no jokes, no gags, no socks, no shoes.  It's a barefoot, serious song about, and for, the earth and all of us who breathe there.
Because of this serious and reverent tone, I felt the song didn't quite sound like me, so I recorded a demo and sent it to Claudia Robin Gunn, who sings so much, so well and so beautifully about the more-than-human world. She's got whole albums of songs for the earth and ocean and animals who live there (Sing for the Earth and Sing for the Sea).  She listened and responded right away, then took some time to let the song sink in and to have her own conversation with it.  A year later, I had a recording of her singing a new introduction to the song and four layers of harmony on the verses - wow! We chatted about it and decided it would feel right for both of us to have our voices in the song.  Her performance was so good and inspired that I started my own recording over from scratch with Sean Pearson at Boxcar Sound in Hamilton. It took us a few months to surround Claudia's vocals with perfect backing tracks - Stand-up Bass by my brother Andrew, an orchestral variety of percussion from Adam Coolsaet in New Orleans, and new Ukulele, vocal and keyboard tracks by me. 
Hold Up is the first song I feel like I've produced. I always have pretty strong ideas about arrangements and sounds and I've worked with musicians and engineers to create recorded songs, but fitting all the emailed tracks together, choosing when they come in and out and then building (and re-building) tracks in studio around them was a . . . project.  Sean added great ideas, expertise and a thousand mouse clicks in ProTools. All together, Claudia, Sean, Andrew, Adam and I joined our best talents to the flow and we created Hold Up.  We hope you listen and feel like you fit into that flow along with the tree, the river, the mountain and the rest of the living, breathing world.