Elephant Revival – Petals (audio) (premiere)

Colorado’s Elephant Revival spring from a state full of amazing string bands and they are among the very finest. Folk music is serious business around the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest and those areas are a veritable hotbed of forward-looking, traditionally rooted, string musicians who break boundaries between types of folk music, thereby creating new hybrids continually. Elephant Revival is one such group, a band of virtuosic musicians — you can’t really be anything else in bluegrass/folk as there’s nothing to hide behind — that are rooted in both Celtic and American folk, but bring in elements of African music, reggae. classic jazz and bluegrass.

The group’s fourth album, Petals, releases April 1st via Thirty Tigers and we have the gorgeous title tune to share with you today. Bonnie Paine (vocals, stompboard, washboard, djembe, musical saw) tells PopMatters that she enjoys “a song can be interpreted very differently from one person to the next. Noticing the endlessly varying ways of experiencing the same thing is indeed part of the influence behind ‘Petals’. In some ways the song is a search to recognize how we identify ourselves and each other while setting aside preconceived ideas of who we are and how we should or should not be — to connect with the world around us in a way that does not confine but encourages.”