Pages tagged “the innocence mission”

Since 1988, the husband-and-wife songwriting team of Don and Karen Peris have released eight studio recordings under the moniker of The Innocence Mission, and this spring they’re back with a ninth.

Set for release by Badman Recording Co. on March 20, We Walked In Song is The Innocence Mission’s first disc of original material since Befriended was honored by NPR as a “Top 10 Album of the Year for 2003.” The LP was recorded at the Peris’ home studio in Lancaster, Penn., and features Karen on vocals, guitars, pump and Hammond organs, and piano; Don on backing vocals, guitars, drums and Hammond organ; and Mike Bitts on upright and electric bass guitars.

Although dates have yet to be announced, the band plans to tour the East Coast this spring.

We Walked In Song tracklist:

1. Brotherhood of Man
2. Happy Birthday
3. Love That Boy
4. Into Brooklyn, Early in the Morning
5. Lake Shore Drive
6. Song for Tom
7. Since I Still Tell You My Every Day
8. A Wave is Rolling
9. Colors of the World
10. Over the Moon
11. My Sisters Return from Ireland

Related links:
The Innocence Mission on MySpace
The Innocence Mission’s official site
Badman Recording Co.

I can’t remember which philosopher observed that life is a series of back and forth movements, from positions of risk to positions of relative safety. This is true not only on an hour-to-hour level—driving a car, then sleeping in a cozy bed—but in a larger sense. We go on life journeys, personal odysseys, and return home to regroup. In this way, we grow, we become wiser; as T.S. Eliot said, we “arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” The Innocence Mission is a band for the home half of the cycle.

In the summer of 1995, after working and going to school in Manhattan for two years, my wife and I moved back to St. Louis—my hometown. I was entering the seminary. Life seemed to stop in its tracks, because we had been moving, bustling, trying, stretching, accommodating, and now we were back on familiar ground with a stack of theology textbooks and a course schedule card. We lived with two cats in a carpeted apartment. On Sunday afternoon you might hear the dryer clicking, and occasionally the bells at St. Roch would chime. Nothing else.

For me, it was the perfect season of life in which to discover The Innocence Mission’s Glow—Karen Peris’ shimmering vocals describing, in lucid fragments, what it means to live at home among family and friends. “Hearing your voice in the blue light, / calming people in the house, / traveling upstairs — / good to be there / now, right now,” begins the first song on the album, “Keeping Awake.” It goes on to describe voices floating around the house, plans being made to go on a picnic, a sister running into her room. The speaker seems to be moving in and out of a dream-state as she says, “Oh I’m near to sleeping, I’m keeping awake … // In the house / In the heart of paper vines.”

“Bright as Yellow,” explores the integral role of personal relationship to the joy of being at home. “And you live life with your arms reached out. / Eye to eye when speaking. / Enter rooms with great joy shouts, / happy to be meeting.” The speaker wants to be bright and warm, not thorny or ostentatious. But in these lyrics you can see that Peris’ lyrical style is quite abstract. She takes the joy of home out of its comfortable narrative, casting it instead in small shiny phrases, the kinds of words that might run through your head when you’re drifting off … nearly napping.

“Brave” brings a twist; there’s trouble. Of course, we don’t know exactly what it is, but we have hints. “You cry up in your room,” she says. “You see how I go to pieces … // And I always go to pieces. /And I have it in my mind / that the sky is tall and heavy, / when I could be / brave, / brave.” The poet I think of when I hear the sky described as “tall and heavy” is 19th-century French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud. He sees the world as a collection of concrete objects, shifting and regrouping; in his poetry, feelings and ideas become things.

Later that fall, I sold my hip urban Volkswagen Golf and bought a 1984 Chevrolet Caprice station wagon. Talk about a comfortable ride—it had cushy, velvety bench seats and the crappiest tape deck imaginable, with big plastic knobs. It had this smell that only GM cars have. I began to realize The Innocence Mission and my new Chevy complimented one another. There was something about cranking up that old V8 engine, lowering the power window in the tailgate, and steering the car quietly down the street—crunching leaves and twigs under massive squishy tires—that felt like home. The car symbolized pure emotion.

Home is about people, the shapes of people, their eyes, their expressions, cast in deep psychological memory. “Cars and trees go by me,” Peris writes in “Happy, The End”; “You are in the yard, / and in my arms again.” The very next track, “Our Harry,” begins: “We will squint into the sun, / waving madly at the camera, / Harry standing in the front. / And I will be sitting on his shoulders.” Later, in “Everything’s Different Now,” Peris returns to earlier imagery—“Now we’re in the yard. / Aunt Mary’s car is coming, coming. / And all of our plans / are giants in this light, / now that we’re coming away.” You can see that, even to Peris, the car is a kind of emotional object. People, cars, yards lights, and plans constellate around one another. From song to song, they break up, move and reconnect in different patterns.

But how does a sense of home persist when everything’s different now? “Everything’s changed,” she tells us; “Everything, even the sun.” This, I think, is what Eliot is referring to in the lines quoted above. We know the place for the first time, partly because our travels have changed us, but also partly because the place itself has changed. Peris is right: everything changes. This would be immensely sad if not for powerful moments of grace throughout the poetry of Glow. Even in the first track she tells us, “My room is held in someone’s arms, / my bed is held in someone’s arms. / I am—I’m held now.” In the last, she renews this idea with another symbol:

Say about iron bridges.

I will not be alone there.

The hope expressed in Glow is one that transcends the cycle of risk and comfort, travel and return. It is a hope that, no matter where you go, you are “held in someone’s arms.”

On the cover of The Innocence Mission’s new album, Befriended, you see a man inclining his head while a woman, eyes gently shut, seems to be offering some intimate secret that belongs to him alone. Perhaps it’s a declaration of love, or simply an inside joke that no one else would understand. Regardless, whoever designed the album’s artwork had a keen sense of the music contained within, and realized this particular image speaks volumes more than any blurb-filled sticker ever could. To listen to Karen Peris’ hauntingly exquisite voice is to feel like you’re being entrusted with something precious, a captivating secret to unwrap slowly and savor. One crystalline syllable at a time.

Over the phone, Karen’s whispery voice is barely audible in my receiver, so I listen as intently as I can, assuming that she’s afraid speaking too loudly might wake her two young children. Her husband, Don, who happens to make up another third of The Innocence Mission’s line-up (leaving only bassist Mike Bitts unaccounted for), gets on a separate line so that he can join in the conversation as well.

“We really haven’t done any extensive touring since our son was born five years ago,” Karen says. “We’ll do some concerts this fall, and we’re looking forward to that. But it won’t be in one long stretch.”

Neither parent seems to mind that their days of extensive touring have been cut short due to the children. Karen even mentions that a couple of the songs on the record were written expressly for them, namely “Martha Ave Love Song” and Befriended’s opener, “Tomorrow on the Runway,” in which Karen says she expresses her wish “to follow the light of my children and not continue to get bogged down in regretful thoughts of the past, to not be self-conscious, to follow their light and leave myself behind.”

Karen, Don and Mike weren’t far removed from childhood when they first performed together as the stage band for their Lancaster, Pa. Catholic high school production of Godspell. Several years later they had a record deal with A&M and a band name which seemed to offer a semantic impression of where their music was headed.

Don claims the band never dreamed of achieving rock stardom before adding, “Well, maybe before the first record we expected more than what was possible, but that was a long time ago.” After more than a decade of creating music and touring the country, expectations for the band have been refined accordingly. “Now for many, many years, we’ve just hoped that the record will find people who embrace it, that it means something to. And that’s something we hope happens every time.”

Listening to a record by The Innocence Mission is to have your heart broken and lovingly bandaged, over and over and over. In “Tomorrow on the Runway,” Karen sings, “Oh be the music in my head, the air around my bed / Oh be my rest / Replace the small disgraces of the times and places that I never really left.” Digesting lyrics like these means exhaling an assortment of sighs, each one distinctive—sorrow, contentment, lovesickness, nostalgia, joy. Occasionally in the same breath.

Befriended contains a dedication from Karen to her recently deceased mother, Mary McCullough, in the form of a song called “I Never Knew You From the Son.” Karen’s plaintive, ringing voice floats over strains of somber piano, proclaiming, “Oh I had a friend. I had a friend I loved / Now I walk for miles into dark forests of piano songs / I’m lost.” But even in that time of loss (and feeling lost), new life had found its way into the Peris’ life.

“A few months before my mom died,” Karen recounts, “my daughter was born, so there was that great joy as well. … That’s why a lot of the songs on our records contain sorrow and joy, because that’s the way most people experience life.”

Simple melodies float from the speakers. The kind of melodies that make you feel nostalgic. You’re a kid again, hopping through sprinklers in the summer sun; watching the world slip away out the back window of your mother’s station wagon…

The Innocence Mission’s Karen Peris steps up to the mic and sings, “Oooh, I have seen this day before.” The intertwining tones and softly sung lyrics are romantic as falling snow. It’s the first song of the night at the band’s long-awaited appearance at the Fez in NYC and Peris’ contagious smile captivates the crowd. With her constant flirtatious glances at husband and band-mate Don Peris during songs, it’s evident how much the couple enjoys playing together.

Karen’s enchanting songwriting and Don’s tactful chord placement and jazz-like guitar tone shined as the band eased through its latest material. When familiar tunes from albums like Glow and Birds of My Neighborhood reached the listeners’ ears, the audience echoed the bands contentment. As the music played, I felt as if I’d drifted into some dream sequence from a foreign film.

After being treated to Innocence Mission classics like “One for Sorrow Two for Joy,” “Bright as Yellow,” “Keeping Awake” and “The Lakes of Canada,” the New York crowd demonstrated its sincere love for The Innocence Mission's well-arranged folk music.

The band, in turn, showed its appreciation with a double encore. At the end of the show, there was a brief moment of quiet. The audience stood listless and limp as the final notes of a captivating melody rang through the venue. The band took a bow and left the cheering masses behind. For some moments in life, we could all use a rewind button.