Country Rock with a dash of Irony and a hint of Woodstock

 

 

Album Notes

    When we write and record adult songs we're known as Cross Creek. We do this so as not to confuse our Battersby Duo fans, who know us for our wacky Children's songs. So this CD is for all the Moms and Dads who over the years have asked us to write an album just for them. Thanks for being so patient!

We grew up in London and Washington DC and in spite of being “City Kids,” we came to live in central Florida 25 years ago.We live in a very rural and beautiful part of the USA. Lakes, rivers and nature abound, and with them, the wildlife we’ve come to love and respect.

Many of the songs we’ve written for Children over the past 25 years are about the animals and nature that so delightfully create our landscape in and around Spring Lake, where we live with the turtles, deer, snakes and alligators. At dawn sometimes a panther can be seen padding across our backyard.

In the 1920’s Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moved from NY to Cross Creek and won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel “The Yearling” about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn. Her love affair with rural Florida and the “crackers” she subsequently became friends with, prompted her to write Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of her relationships with her neighbours, and her beloved Florida hammocks.
Our life on Spring Lake for the past 25 years has been in many ways much the same as Marjorie Rawlings life on Cross Creek

The songs on this CD were all written during our stay in Florida, and range in topic from the retro optimistic Song for Dylan, to the pessimistic & gritty A Child Cries. Each song, journey's along an avenue of family emotions that most of us deal with daily.The English Teacher is a nod to literacy and to all who are keen of mind.Reflections of a Major, is a song of war and loss, while Out on the Town Again, is just downright frisky! I wrote That Magical Youth high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in a cabin on a snowy December night and Walking down by the Sea, I wrote in a rowboat on Spring Lake one July evening last year. A Storm is Coming is a very personal peek into the minds of two very private people.   

Reviews

 

    Nicolas Chadwick. London IS.com
 "Blisteringly sincere, and coming straight from the heart."

The songs on "A Storm is Coming," the new CD from The Battersby Duo, are so gently, sweetly thought-provoking. 
There’s a certain wonderful homely American quality..... just a little melancholy (except for that Magical Youth, which is heart-wrenching), which is just the thing for us folks who’ve learned a thing or two about navigating those crocodile-infested waters of life. But by no means resigned to it!
We’re still able to enjoy going Out on the Town and dancing wickedly close in smoky bluesy barrooms. Fantasy, perhaps. Or not... who knows. And though we may be defiantly set in our ways like the Old Man and his southern comfort, we can still learn and adapt and we hope other folks can as well. 
The 12 songs on "A Storm is Coming" are blisteringly sincere and come straight from the heart. I love the album.

    Pete Shanks
A Storm is Coming. Seriously Adult Music

First things first: "A Storm Is Coming" sounds lovely. The singing and playing are full of relaxed confidence, a gentle sway that draws 
the listener in. It's tinged with country, spiced with a little blues, and centred around a rhythmic kind of small-group folk-rock 
that never stops leaning forward. You could lie in ahammockand listen to this all night.

Then phrases from the lyrics seep into your consciousness: "It's just business, he said, as he smiled so seriously ..." (to a tune that 
puts a smile on your face). And: "Mrs Jones, we regret that your son has been killed in the war ..." Or: "I remember a time when a tousled-haired child went walking with old Father Time ..." As the words sink in, you start to understand that this is seriously adult music, made 
by people who have lived, and learned to accept their lives as they really are, not just as they wish they were. It's not exactly political, it's just real. Even the joyful "Out on the Town Again" includes the wry commentary: "So now I've cast my hook and all I see, / Are glimpses of my insecurity. / I never want to feel this way again; / I never want to feel the same."

Tim and Laura have spent years singing silly for kids -- but kids are a tough audience, and the kids certainly knew (even if they didn't 
know they knew) that the Battersby Duo could be silly about lost socks and elephants' toenail pizza precisely because their hearts were
always in the right place. They always encouraged children to read and learn and appreciate the world around them. Now, under the name Cross Creek (just so no one gets confused), they are singing for the parents, and for themselves.

Will this recording change the world? I doubt it, and I don't think it's really meant to. It’s just part of the world and the world is 
better for that.