by Frank Gualtier -- 04/26/06, 06/17/06
Rosie Burgess is a folk musician and story teller of impressive prolificacy and wit. She conjures such lines as "clouds are ganging up on me ... outside the people swim through rivers of the aching skies" with apparent ease and delivers them with uncontrived charm.Her music is sincere and detail laden. I would be hard pressed to believe many, if any, of her songs were made without a good amount of thought and feeling. Of course as said she is witty and I can imagine her rifling off thoughts at twice the speed of most mere mortals. This also shows in the size of her songbook. I counted four compilations (at least 34 songs) she's produced thus far. You just can't write as many songs as she has of such quality without being very quick, very intelligent, very deep - or old as dust. She is nowhere near the latter.
Most of her songs are thoroughly saturated with guitar(s) and her voice(s). There are other things usually laid in sparsely such as winds and percussion but much of her material is just her and guitar.
Her guitar playing is something worthy of note in it's own right. Along with slide she has two very distinct styles in which she wills the guitar to her bidding. One is delightfully percussive with both picking and strumming and the other is a very fluid resonate picking style (think simon and garfunkle for example). When I was first listening I managed to begin with several songs that were very sparse and percussive - a one woman show summoning up a band from just her guitar. Then I ran into her use of separate percussion and it just threw me into a wonderful place. How one woman draws so much from so little is an amazing thing to hear.
She has a wonderful voice that is spendidly articulate. You can actually understand what she's saying. It's a soothing voice that's a bit breathy at times and jumps into a lovely falsetto now and then.
She has a rather impressive number of full length downloadable songs at her website and it's my hope that perhaps I've said something to inspire at least a few people to go and have a taste of this inspirational and heartfelt woman. I bet the standard question 'is the glass half ...' will always be answered 'full' by anyone who's just had an earful of Rosie Burgess.
Be sure to see the store at her website. She's generous in giving others a chance to give her a serious test run and much more music is available for purchase there.
Links for Rosie Burgess:
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