Mark Erelli
New Roots in Pioneer Valley
by Pamela Murray Winters

The Pioneer Valley of New England has more singer/songwriters than Stephen King has inches of manuscript-file space, and 26-year-old Mark Erelli is the latest musician to emerge from this scene, borne on the shoulders of critics. In one oft-quoted snippet of acclaim, Ed McKeon of Hartford, Connecticut's Herald called him "Woody Guthrie with a groove." His self-titled debut album hit the ground running in 1999, and its followup, Compass and Companion, is garnering positive press and climbing the Americana and Adult Album Alternative charts. (Both recordings are on Signature Sounds.)

If you want to call Erelli "rootsy," he's fine with that. "I like to dig," he explained. "I played in the sandbox a lot when I was a kid, and my favorite movie was Indiana Jones. And when I got to be a little bit older, I got a graduate degree in evolutionary biology. I have a big interest in where things come from and how they got that way.
"[Science and music] are really not that different at all, particularly with traditional music. If you're a scientist, you can't just go off and perform experiments willy-nilly; you have to know who did what and when before you. And I don't think it's really any different in music." In popular music from about 400 years ago until the Beatles, he opined, "You're not going to do anything that hasn't really been done before in one way or another. So the only thing you can hope to do is filter it through your particular viewpoint."

Erelli's "Take My Ashes to the River," co-written with Seattle songwriter Jonathan Kingham, is a ballad steeped in tradition, from its Appalachian-style mournful melody to its lyric about giving over a loved one to death. He noted that "Ashes" isn't typical of his music; then again, not much is typical for this musical explorer.

Between recording Mark Erelli and Compass and Companion, Erelli listened to a lot of country music. "There's a Western swing number on the new album ['Why Should I Cry']. That was something I'd never done before, that I loved. And 'Take My Ashes to the River,' that kind of traditional-sounding ballad, was something I'd never done before. Those are the successful experiments."

This is an excerpt from issue #94.
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