LINDSAY FERGUSON / “MONKEYS UNDER STARS” (2011)

I’ve often thought we are animals just kidding ourselves; the only thing separating us from our beastly brethren are the razorblades and an aptness for flattery.  I even believe we love as animals do, but pretend and deny the transitory nature of our animalistic condition to seek out long-term companionship and, ultimately, long term acceptance. Like Monkeys Under Stars our love is small, fragile, fleeting and vulnerable. We are all monkeys under stars.

Lindsay Ferguson’s album of the same name bears witness to the existentialism and grand-smallness of the human condition, told through highly personal accounts of love and its corresponding struggles and intricacies.

Striking a balance between self-loathing and self-empowerment,  the album is a refined statement of the artistic journey, a process of passion, a workflow designed to tackle an endless onslaught of beauty, darkness and the bittersweets. Ferguson’s  voice operates like a well-devised plot-line, touching on conflict, completion and back again as the album’s storyline unfolds – undoubtedly a love story.

The album opens with “Monkeys Under Stars”, a song with irrevocable melody and heartrending playfulness.  One cannot help but picture two souls sitting on a branch working through a lover’s quarrel, the type only a jungle could serve-up. Although the song roots itself in traditional pop-rock sensibility, there is also something ancient and folksy about the composition, a portal for ancestral longings.

“It Becomes You” is the second track on the album. It’s both a tribute to the artist within and to the courage of following one’s dreams. Artists understand that one’s medium is the medicine which centers the soul but can also imprison it. Ferguson contends that mediocrity is the fear that drives the artist to create blindly as they create forward through life.  The bridge slows the anxiety of the first verses as the form of the song becomes a blueprint for the listener; a map which directs one to stop, breath and slow down. How often do we, as artists, lose ourselves in the velocity of competition?

“Got No Time” and “Boxing Gloves” moves the album away from self-criticism into the realm of self-empowerment, by condemning the forces working against the feminine soul. Beautifully angry in all the right ways, “Boxing Gloves” is an upbeat round placing us all in Lindsay’s corner, hoping she wins against the world.

My favorite of the album is undoubtedly “Sky And Me”, a beautiful tapestry of country rock unfolding in triumph and grace as Ferguson’s commanding voice pleads with the cosmos.  The song speaks to the smallness of the individual in a vast and beautiful world. In this world Lindsay speaks to Mother Nature and her children: the sun, the clouds, the rivers and the moon. The song is a celebration of the natural world, from which we are inseparable and which we too often forget to marvel upon!

As an achievement in musicianship the album has an incredibly diverse trajectory, as it bends genres yet comes out the other side a coherent whole. The influences are obvious but the end result is unique. Monkeys Under Stars is what every album should be: a passionate and honest analysis of the self, one in anxious need of embrace.

If we are all monkeys under stars, the ones looking up are the artists, and the ones looking down….should listen to this album!

You can find our VoiceBox Session with Lindsay under the Arts Tab!