(LP) Tim Baker - Full Rainbow Of Light

November 15th, 2024

Standard Black Vinyl

Full Rainbow of Light. This is the title of my next full-length recording project. It’s concerned with conveying one feeling in particular. The feeling of being at home for Christmas. In a peaceful way. Through many themes and stories and sounds, these songs keep pointing me home, to my own people, in my own place, in Newfoundland & Labrador – the tradition and the change of it, the warmth and the winter, the hardship and the hope of it. The lyrics steer me there. There’s a song about how “when all the leaves are gone, you can see the sun, coming up, on your bedroom walls, like an old old song”. There’s a song about how “when I dream of you, and I always do, you’ve just rushed in, in a gust of wind, & you’re singing out, how I love that sound, my name is like a bell, my heart is like a hound”. Another about how to “begin again, with no memory, of any of the love and pain you gave to me, with just a black night, and the snow outside, to show me how to start again, with nothing on my mind”. But more than the lyrics, there is the sound.

I’ve extended the palette of my last few releases (what to call it – maybe: dynamic acoustic and piano-driven singer-songwriter folk-rock: reminiscent of 1970s tape; a breezy band live in a wooden room, feeling their way, freely yet fittingly, through songs that are simple and singable and more sophisticated than they first appear) to include some more traditionally Newfoundland and Irish elements. On my last EP “Along the Mountain Road” I had Michael Walsh play some uilleann pipes on a track and the evocative warmth of it was magic. I recently had The Dardanelles over to the house playing some accordion, guitar, fiddle & whistle on some tunes I’d written, and it felt like a party. It felt like a party I was reticent for years to have, but enjoyed so much when at last it arrived, I knew then I needn’t’ve put it off so long. I hear this project as full of these sounds, rooted in history and human voices, freely sung; of drums & percussion unrestrained by the traditional rock drum-kit; of found sound & field recordings; of images of rooms with fires lit, friends lit, family and everyone gathered in.

- Tim Baker 

TRACKLIST:

Side A:

1. It's Tonight

2. Full Rainbow

3. Light the Light

4. Saint Tibb’s Suite:

I. Tibb's Eve

II. Uncle Slush’s, Sam Sinnock's, Susanna Perry's

III. Will It Ever Come?

Side B:

5. Out Come the Plows

6. Ice on the River

7. Christmas Rose

8. Evergreen

9. I’ll Be Home for Christmas

10. Down Come the Boughs