A way to escape
Bird of Paradise (LisaLeo Records, 2010) fills a lot of
spaces. In our ordinary life we create holes inside us that we abandon just
because our cowardice. It was the same situation as kids when we got
scolded, we use to negate those spaces, which are really necessaries, just to
not accept our fault. Maybe, we’re selling a little bit of our souls every day
to the devil we all have inside just for nothing else than a poor smoke, and
that means nothing. Is there something else? Yes, there are birds so free that
we are unable to recognize them. There are flights over the paradise.
There’s veins of hope in broken things, see my blood re-inflate
his wings, I’ll kiss him like a wasp sting and shock him into loving me. A guitar pizzicato precedes the beautiful
voice of Sophie Bancroft in the song Occasional
China in which she stops in
every detail of her beloved. The viola’s solo really thrills giving us the
fragility feeling of the never said words that build spaces on the verge of a
break up. But tenderness appears in I
carried your heart, a personal song by Sophie. Her intonation is so warm
telling us time passes by,
the earth turns completely around once every day…and still I can see from my
front door the same piece of sky. But
it’s any piece of sky, it’s the blue that accompanies her each year, the
shoulder where she rested so many tired looks and created so many questions fed
on her own lights, shadows and silences. That piece of sky will always be with
her, wherever she is.
Whispers are important when they
arrived loaded down with truth and no need in the love to the other disguise. No smokin’ just accepts the need that admits the
bitterness and the egoism with no disguises. I’m
waitin’ on you to light me again, I’m waitin’ to you to ignite me again, I need
you to drink my musty tears, I need you to light my cigarette, I need you to
tell me you’ll always be here. Then,
to admit it is to love it.
Again, Sophie in her own words and
music brings intensity to her acoustic guitar in the title song of the album. I am a window cleaner, cleaning
the people’s eyes, I am a bird of Paradise. Conformism is not enough when
she has a deep curiosity living inside her to the full.
Her voice gets away, she wants to
fly beyond her kitchen’s walls. She talks to them in an inert way. They never
answer like her piece of sky does because her mind is in a magical and
mysterious journey, full of walrus and fools hills.
That feeling is more painful when the geese fly south, feel lost and lonely here, your
dreams of yesterday surround me as they fall in dusty silence. Everything is fragile and fearful even
at home, but there when I
cover my ears I still hear your song and with eyes wide shut I see where I
belong and I know that I am home. If
we all closed our eyes, her voice would take us back home and we would meet
again our piece of blue sky. Just the way she already did it in her previous
album Handwritten (2008).
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo courtesy of Sophie Bancroft