David Wilcox Out Beyond Ideas CD

Neither David Wilcox or Nance Pettit planned on creating an album called Out Beyond Ideas when they started reading sacred poetry. The accidental project began when a friend gave the couple a book of mystic poetry for Christmas. Soon, they -- being musicians -- decided to set the poems to music. As they continued this experiment, just for fun, the harmonies and arrangements worked themselves out, and before long, they were performing these songs for friends. Everyone liked the songs, but they all had one question: are the songs available on a CD? They weren't. Furthermore, a number of people began to volunteer to play on an album including Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann. As one might imagine, mystic poetry works well within a singer/songwriter format -- a natural fit. So while a musical-poem like "How Did the Rose Ever Open" might seem a bit esoteric (or old fashioned), it isn't all that far removed from the general contemplations that singer/songwriters are prone to. The real drawing power here, however, is the intertwined voices of Wilcox and Pettit. Their comfort with one another is evident and the merger of their voices also creates a lovely blend on Out Beyond Ideas. Singer/songwriter fans and lovers of esoteric poetry will enjoy this outing. ~ Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.

David Wilcox/Nance Pettit BiographyAfter a total of 12 albums released between them, 11 for David (4 on A&M Records, 3 on Koch Records, 2 on Vanguard Records, and 2 on What Are Records?) www.davidwilcox.com, and 1 for Nance, 1995's Skin and Water, (Fresh Baked Records), it seemed somewhat inevitable that eventually they would do one together.But they tell the story best:"This is the blossom. It's what all your music has been leading toward." These words surprised us, but we couldn't deny the way these poems seemed to mysteriously bloom into music. When we sang them for our friend Rich Hordinski who had produced David's most recent CD, he said that he would love to work on this next one. We said that we didn't have any plans to record the poems, they were just an offshoot of our love of singing together.Someone had given us a collection of mystic poetry for Christmas, and in the evenings by the fire when our son was in bed, we had fun finding melody and chords that seemed to open up the meaning of these ancient poems. The arrangements evolved through singing them together round and round as we switched harmonies. The way they came to life was remarkable.As the months went by, we had more and more poems ready to sing for friends. It became our private musings with the mystics in the midst of our busy day-to-day living. The process always surprises us, as if by climbing into these poems, they begin to show us the way they want to be written. Now they are beginning to show us how they want to be recorded.Friends kept asking when could they hear it on CD? They offered to help. Great musicians offered to play on it, including drummer Bill Kreutzman of the Grateful Dead. Wow, this is clearly bigger than us. We got a strong feeling that this should not be for profit. These poems would live longer than we would, as they had already outlived forty generations before us. We imagined that the work these poems do in the world is measured not in units sold, but in centuries, and with that perspective, we wanted to donate our time and money and creativity to help that work.These poems are from many traditions, including poems of Saint Francis of Assisi , Sufi Mystics Jalaludin Rumi and Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz, Rabia of Basra and poems from Jewish Mystical Poets Judiah Halevi and Solomon ibn Gabriol Uvavnuk, an Netsilik Inuit, Tukarum from India, and the Zen poets Dogen Kigen and Wu-men Hui-K'ai. As we sang the poetry of Jewish, Sufi, Christian, Hindu and Zen Buddhist mystics, we heard a common voice in their direct experiences with God. The language was very intimate, passionate, and present tense, using fresh images from everyday life. In