MINORBIRDS
Minorbirds Music
Body Knows
About the Album
We are eternally grateful to these fellow Minorbirds who continue to support and enhance us in our creative and musical endeavors:
Jeff Gilbertson - upright bass, horns, and background vocals
Caleb Anderson - keys, accordion, organ
Ben Berg - drums
And a huge thank you to these musicians who lent their talents to this album:
Jacob Mahon - guitar, background vocals
Nicolle Gilbertson - violin
Rich Mattson - guitar, electric Bass
We also want to acknowledge the incredible talent of artist Iris Gibson, who created the album art, bringing our thistle to life.
Finally, we can't thank Rich and Germaine at Sparta Sound enough for their hospitality as they opened their home to us while we recorded this album.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Rich Mattson at Sparta Sound.
Made possible in part by a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Jeff Gilbertson - upright bass, horns, and background vocals
Caleb Anderson - keys, accordion, organ
Ben Berg - drums
And a huge thank you to these musicians who lent their talents to this album:
Jacob Mahon - guitar, background vocals
Nicolle Gilbertson - violin
Rich Mattson - guitar, electric Bass
We also want to acknowledge the incredible talent of artist Iris Gibson, who created the album art, bringing our thistle to life.
Finally, we can't thank Rich and Germaine at Sparta Sound enough for their hospitality as they opened their home to us while we recorded this album.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Rich Mattson at Sparta Sound.
Made possible in part by a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Minorbirds
About the Album
It’s strange for an album’s contents, creatively speaking, to be so evenly divided between its band members. But this is the way it was done on the Minorbirds self-titled first album. Six songs were written and composed by Brooke and six by Megan. We generally don’t collaborate together when we’re writing songs. For this reason, when we started talking about recording an album, it was difficult for us to imagine that we could produce something cohesive. The term “concept album” was far from our minds initially. We were happy just to get these songs out and captured for our family and friends. But as the recording process became more serious, things changed. The album started to become alive, taking on its own personality, preferences, and particularities. We started feeling more like passengers in the process, instead of drivers. The album began to be unified by common threads. New songs were written and old songs were discarded. The songs that initially didn’t seem to fit together suddenly surprised us with what they had in common. What was that commonality? It was hard to capture its spirit in a single word, or even a string of words, but there was an image which kept returning to us: the image of the Russian Matryoshka doll.
This is a powerful traditional image, and its power lies in its ability to capture multi-dimensional and mythical concepts in one symbolic representation. For this reason, we’d be most inclined to leave our listeners to receive and explore this image alongside our music and interpret it as they would.
That being said, we will disclose that one of the more compelling concepts we explored in the image of the nesting doll was the tension of the generations that came before us, and how they can function both as something that hold and nurture, and something that confine and bind. As something of power, but also something of weakness.
We are thrilled to bring you this album. We’ve enjoyed the whole process, and it has been greatly enhanced by the many collaborations with musicians, friends, and family along the way. We hope you enjoy our work and that it brings encouragement to your lives!
Love,
Brooke and Megan
This is a powerful traditional image, and its power lies in its ability to capture multi-dimensional and mythical concepts in one symbolic representation. For this reason, we’d be most inclined to leave our listeners to receive and explore this image alongside our music and interpret it as they would.
That being said, we will disclose that one of the more compelling concepts we explored in the image of the nesting doll was the tension of the generations that came before us, and how they can function both as something that hold and nurture, and something that confine and bind. As something of power, but also something of weakness.
We are thrilled to bring you this album. We’ve enjoyed the whole process, and it has been greatly enhanced by the many collaborations with musicians, friends, and family along the way. We hope you enjoy our work and that it brings encouragement to your lives!
Love,
Brooke and Megan