by Serah
Let's quote from the PR: "For the past decade and a half, Serah has been on a musical quest to illuminate mankind's "higher nature" and help people learn to be more spiritual, soulful, and sharing." So you know where she's coming from, and it shows through in the music. I interviewed her once, and I know she means it.
She's a fascinating woman, considered by many the first "new age diva," and compared vocally to Lorena McKennitt and Sarah McLachlan. In an earlier life, she lived in Kenya, and many of her themes, musically and lyrically, hearken back to that time. She's also lived in Los Angeles, Paris, and New York, and her newest and seventh album Late Harvest brings together influences and musicians from all four locales. African styling greets us in the opening number, "I Think I Know," and looms heavy in the background vocals on "Forgive The Moon."
She's got some cool melodies… not the kind of thing you'll be singing while you fold laundry, but the kind of thing that hooks into your psychology and makes that folding a little less arduous. My faves are "I Think I Know," plus "Joined At The Wing" and "Pieces of Dreams." A couple other songs fall a little flat; frankly there's just not enough going on in the tune or the arrangement to hold interest.
Lyrics tend towards the spiritual, and are much more intelligent that what you'll find on your usual FM radio station; though if you find the whole "new age spirituality" thing annoying, you'll be annoyed on a few occasions.
Serah does four covers, including some too familiar songs like "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" and "Stand By Me," and I'm not sure her rendition of these adds much to what we've already heard. The best of these is Sailing, the Christopher Cross hit from about 20-something years ago. "It's a wonderful metaphor about getting into a transcendent zone where you move from the little 'r" reality and connect to the big 'R' Reality," she notes. What's really memorable here is sax playing by Andy Snitzer, whose wispy solos throughout this CD have a special emotion that can only be expressed through… well.. a wispy sax. But on this song in particular, it's pretty special. "Crazy Love, "a Van Morrison cover, and "Sailing" have hit the top 20 on the adult contemporary.
Her packaging is pretty cool, each song in the pamphlet is accompanied by a painting, there's a neat photo collage of the many who collaborated to bring these songs to life.
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