The Blackbird reawaken a 19th-Century spell with "The Lordly Ones"

The Blackbird present something unusual, a live connection between the past and the present on “The Lordly Ones”. There are songs that entertain, and then there are songs that seem to have been waiting for well over a century to exhale. Based on the text of Fiona Macleod’s  play, the piece is infused with that lyric mysticism so beloved by a previous time, but newly illuminated by music commissioned  from Greg Dinunzi. 

“The Lordly Ones” is a chamber-folk meditation. From there, the song’s glowing core of nylon guitar and vibraphone generates a gentle shiver that is at once intimate and otherworldly. All around them, cello and viola provide warmth and gravity, bass clarinet and subtle percussion shadow and pulse. And the orchestration is reverent, thoughtful, each instrument arrives like a careful footstep in sanctuary.

It comes from a fresh, new original score of The Immortal Hour that was performed at The Assembly Rooms of Glastonbury. It didn’t feel like a premiere so much as it did a communion, an audience hushed to hear something eternal rendered anew.

“The Lordly Ones”  acoustic textures give space for the language to breathe, honoring Macleod’s lines but surrounding them in a soundscape that sounds both grounded and incandescent. Leave it to The Blackbird to remind us with this record that some fables never age, they just wait for new hands, new strings, and new air.