Mark Erelli - Lay Your Darkness Down
Mark Erelli - Lay Your Darkness Down
(Soundly Music, 2023)
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Mark Erelli has been a professional musician for over 20 years, recording and self-releasing over 25 singles and albums of exceptionally high quality, revealing a lyrical acumen and omnivorous awareness of 20th-century American Music. In 2020, a diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa, with its dire promise of progressive blindness, magnified and focused Erelli's creative intention to a fine point in accepting and coping with this serious turn of events. It changed the nature of his creativity.
A young husband and father, Erelli faced an existential threat only imagined by most. In a turn of corrosive irony, Erelli's diagnosis followed the release and concert support for his recently recorded project, Blindsided (Self Produced, 2020), a collection of songs brimming with sighted imagery in motion. The Richard Thompson-influenced "Rose-Colored Rearview" from Blindsided proves the Divine has a sense of humor, and a wicked one, at that. There could be no better transition between the before of Blindsided and the after of Erelli's response to the pressure and challenge of his life on Lay Your Darkness Down:
"Maybe all that's in the mirror
Was never close as it appeared
Like the truth can seem so black and white
After all our looking through
This rose-colored rearview."
juxtaposed this with,
"Rest easy, brother, and travel light...
Lay your darkness down
Shadows lie upon the ground
To show us where the light is coming from..."
and see what I mean.
Erelli recorded Lay Your Darkness Down during the opening of the COVID-19 pandemic, in his home studio, track over track, playing all the instruments. The inspiration and songs came rapidly and only after Erelli had completed the recording was he able to fully internalize the pathos expressed. Through this, Erelli found his way forward.
Lay Your Darkness Down results from a creative mind under pressure. Erelli remarked, "In some strange way, my disease has provided me with the chance to truly live what I sing." This results from creativity colliding with the challenge of surprise, shock, and uncertainty. The singer's experience and his art fused at a molecular level because of the circumstances, resulting in a significant statement. Erelli used his considerable talent to create a tightly integrated project that could be considered a musical suite. In it, Erelli explores different aspects of his acceptance and healing processes..
It is a long way between the urgency of the moment in "You're Gonna Wanna Remember This:"
"You’re gonna wanna remember this
It flies by, it’s easy to miss
Don’t blink, drink it in
It happens once and it might not happen again"
and the calm acceptance and faith of "Break In The Clouds:"
"I’m gonna wait for a break in the clouds
For the sun to come shining down
Oh it’s hard to keep the faith
but we’re bound for brighter days
So I’m gonna wait for a break in the clouds."
What a gift.