CD Review: Drew Thomas
I love the CD that I got from Drew Thomas. I know, that’s not a very good description for a music review. But that’s the thing about love – words can’t ever do it justice. You can’t describe the way that a person gets inside of you and presses your heart with their own pulse so that yours beats faster than it ever has before. You can’t describe the way that the right person – or the right lyrics – can know you better than you know yourself. Because it doesn’t matter what metaphors you come up with or what flowery prose you draw from your wells of descriptive power, they all fall short of really saying what it is that you’re trying to say.
Love goes through stages. There is an initial attraction in which you feel compelled to know more. There is a period of infatuation in which you want to spend every waking (and dreaming) moment exploring this new experience. This eventually gives way to a comfort, a security, a thing that you go back to again and again because you know that it will never fail you. This is the way that I feel about Drew’s CD. I immediately adored it – Drew’s got a mesmerizing voice and he strums a guitar in a way that makes you want to be strummed. Go to his MySpace and listen to “Tongue Dance” and tell me that you don’t agree.
After adoration necessarily came infatuation. I was drawn further and further into the CD. I listened to all 12 tracks. And then I listened to them again. I learned the lyrics by heart. I heard the nuanced differences between the songs in which Drew rapidly plays his guitar to punctuate his songs and the way that he creates melodies with the music to supplement what he’s saying. I listened to the CD again. And now I’ve settled into the comfortable place where I just love it. It’s on my favorite playlist. He’s on my “pay attention to” radar.
Drew’s got four shows in September – two in San Jose and two here in the city. The city shows are on the 13th at The Peace Café (which seems fitting since Drew does remind me of the hippie friends I had back in my desert home) and on the 20th at Beale St. He sells CDs at his shows … like the one I have, they’re a compilation of “rough cuts” that he has put together to share what it is that he does. And what he does is create magic in your ears.
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