Will Stratton
Gray Lodge Wisdom

“Why hope for the best / when the worst just makes you strong?”

Thrown in randomly, out of context, this lyric could perfectly fit some antagonistic punk band. But Will Stratton, a young American singer-songwriter born in '87, is not rebellious, at least not in the imaginable way. “Gray Lodge Wisdom”, his fifth album, is as much a child of fear as it is of joy, the fear of the cancer he was diagnosed with, and the stubborn joy of someone who overcame it with a desire to remain attached to the land where he lives.

Once this point is clarified, the album's opening takes on a completely different meaning. If from the worst and the fear of the worst flowers of such beauty arise, one might almost agree with what he sang in the title track mentioned at the start. An essentially acoustic album, among the technical fingerpicking of Fahey, or some of his modern followers like Jack Rose (“Wild Rose”) the deity Nick Drake, but with a latent joy absent in the Englishman, and a splash of classical arrangements that balance everything (“Yeah, I'll Requite Your Love”). Along with a gaze lost in the myth of the hippie West Coast (“Dreams Of Big Sur”) and a psychedelic folk experiment worthy of some 70s German madman (“Fate Song”).

The perfect balance of all these different influences is the short yet rich “Long Live The Hudson Valley River Valley”, emblematic of one of the best albums of the year, with a history and warmth decidedly out of the ordinary. Devoting 31 minutes of your time to it seems to me the least you could do.