Bill Stone
Stone

And here among the announced stars of Noel, those silver garlands laid on the soft snow mantle, among those dreamy tufts, the gentle sinking of those steps, that return to the warmth of music abandoned in that old walnut dresser.

While the night lights wrapped the city in that fertile womb, in that odyssey as long as a heartbeat of two hearts. Charlotte’s Town.

There are albums that reveal their wanderer nature right from the first notes.

That pagan gift that asks nothing in return.

Leaving behind those consumed festive moods, letting oneself be enveloped by the silent hour of the night, by the blurred quilt of shadows.

Walking along the roadside and having one's sight captivated by those two lovers on the park bench,

cheek touching another cheek,

amidst the low song of the foliage.

Those sweet lips tasting that honey, it was perhaps just past midnight, waiting for that taxi that was slow to arrive.

Meanwhile, as the mist embroidered ancient shapes, they crept into the head like sick music boxes, rumpled ballads like a snow-laden rope,

pulled by those peaks by two chilled Lou Reed and John Cale.

Do I win, or do you win? Actually, you know what, I'm leaving, said that stubborn Welshman.

Semi-frozen, there it came from the heart of the dark night, that awaited taxi, driven by a mustached driver, a face sculpted by neon and a loquacious chatter considering the hour.

The taxi is a surreal Ford Mustang, the inside is at 19 degrees and compliant, the driver is named Bill Stone, he has the marks of an artist and a toy meter, he might seem like a prince in exile or an artist trying to make ends meet.

At some point, Bill becomes serious and begins to talk about Angels falling in flames from Heaven and the Boston Celtics that no one can kill anymore, plotting beneath trembling mustaches, bringing with him his only album, Stone, a handful of folk gems produced in 500, or maybe 1000 copies, many noble influences among Velvet Underground, Cohen, Pearls Before Swine, a song Crystal Lover of a jagged sweetness that does not fear to hide a great soul.

Also worthy of holding the candle in that third album jewel of the Velvet, among those so bittersweet, so unhealthy nursery rhymes.

Sobs of otherworldly and lysergic depth, amidst soft late-night lunar vibrations, UFO sightings, and glasses of scotch, cigarettes cigarettes & cigarettes, interstices of REM and lunar phases, drones and guitar feedback, nymph choirs awaiting dawn in a Greek theater, Santa Claus and Leonard Cohen.

And after having our hearts warmed by Bill, with Charlotte’s Town you reach the peak of that run, that pocket odyssey, that constant heartbeat in symbiosis with that baroque and lost folk, that walnut dresser that opens and the voice of Bill and Beth Warehouse that adds obsession to that desire, a thin guitar feedback almost offering a faint light to those first morning lights.

11 songs to face another night, a soft fingerpicking to make that surface tension fluid, a constant melancholy for those desires that can be dreamed but not touched, another dark challenger of Time at the service of our ramshackle Court of Miracles.