Elliott Murphy - Prodigal Son (2017) Hi-Res

Record By Record, Murphy By Murphy: Prodigal Son
The last fully produced album of new songs at the time of this writing. I wanted a gospel choir and Gaspard found one in Paris. And the important discovery of Melissa Cox on violin thanks to my old pal Laurent Bachet who saw her playing in a little bar near Bastille. Now Melissa is a regular member of the band. Prodigal Son got incredible reviews (in Rolling Stone) and it’s a difficult album to follow up. I’m still trying… It includes my longest song to date “Absalom, Davy & Jackie O” which is over 11 minutes long! I played it in concert twice.

Like the story of the prodigal son in the Bible, these nine sacred songs took the extravagant way home. In fact, many of them were written before I changed course in mid-stream, having decided with Aquashow Deconstructed, to revisit my fi rst album. Surprisingly, when I returned, I found that the demos for these songs had aged better then I had any right to expect. But songs do have a life of their own, you know, and while I was away on my Proustian journey, these ditties seemed to have bonded with each other to the point of forming an extended musical family; creating some totality of tonality that was greater then the sum of the parts, that was both cinematic and intimate, as if you could put poetry on the big screen. They all became part of the same story. Thus from wobbly baby steps of arrangement and lyric revision to an eventual studio rally of time and space with basic tracks, overdubs and mixing, every enchanting musical element competing to come out on top, we eventually brought these nine home to completion, to a fully realized album. An album, just the word itself, once upon a time meant more then a mumbo-jumbo collection of tracks and rhymes. You better believe that every good album, every meaningful album, is a concept album by it’s very nature. At least that’s what I believe, because there is a fi ne invisible thread woven of soul, persistence and even a little madness that binds it all together into one coherent work, one book of songs, one album.

My thanks especially go out to my son and producer Gaspard Murphy who puts up with his Dad on almost a daily basis and at the same time seems to bring out the best in me.

And sadly, I must dedicate this album to the memory of Laurent Pardo, a fi ne bassist and a sensitive soul who shared my musical journey for nearly a decade. Au Revoir Laurent…