James Houlahan
Based in Los Angeles since moving from his hometown of Boston in 2012, James Houlahan has been writing, recording, and performing music through many twists and turns of fate. He has come to see music as the proper answer, the proper response to a world literally on fire. Recorded with producer Fernando Perdomo at Forward Motion Studios in LA, the new album features seven new songs penned by Houlahan. Songs that speak of the need to embrace change, of making a home in this great mess of a world, and finding the perseverance to keep on keeping on. In fact, many of the tunes address the need and value of music itself, like the track “That Bird and I” where “each song is an offering…songs of love and songs of pain…borrowed tunes from voices past, they echo in a grand symphony.” To find the wherewithal to sing past and through the many tribulations coming down the road at us. To sing on despite it all.
At the center of the album’s hopeful sound is the great rhythm section of drummer Danny Frankel (k.d. lang, Lou Reed) and bassist Greg Cohen (Tom Waits, John Zorn). Being longtime old friends, Cohen and Frankel bring a symbiotic chemistry to the grooves at the heart of each song. The music also features numerous offerings from multi-instrumentalist and folk music legend, John Kruth. Kruth contributes a kaleidoscope of sounds from a great variety of instruments including the Irish whistle, the coyote flute, and the bulbul tarang, an Indian instrument whose name literally translates as “waves of nightingales.” How fitting for an album populated by so many winged creatures! Speaking of winged creatures, they roost, sing, and fly all throughout the track list for On a Wing. Even on the three cover songs we see them take flight. With a moth in Willy Mason’s “Carry On,” hummingbirds in Richard Fariña’s “Joy ‘Round My Brain” and the legendary subject of the old traditional song, “The Cuckoo Bird.” As Emily Dickinson wrote, “hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Houlahan’s songs take that metaphor to heart, populated with images of birds and creatures in flight. Taking to the skies with their own varied melodies, filling the air with the melody and music of worlds yet imagined, beauty not yet expressed. Worlds beyond the calamities of today’s headlines and tomorrow’s heartache. Songs that fly on the winds of hopeful change. On A Wing is Houlahan’s seventh album.
