Visions Of Ovid (LP)

Visions of Ovid is an album by folk artist Brandon De La Cruz, in whose songs the spirits of Greek myth find new bodies. In a recent piece in The New Yorker, Katy Waldman wrote, "Ovid feels strangely present these days, as if the country is reckoning under his riotous star." We are witness to this phenomenon in De La Cruz's voice that has given itself over to the uncanny, at times eerie, spirits of the Greek world.

These spirits tell a range of tales. In the first song Tiresias laments the psychic strife arising through a reckoning of life as a woman who once was a man who is a man again. In another Alcmene depicts the sacrifice of her nurse Galanthis who outwits Lucina, the goddess of birth, to permit the birth of Hercules. The metamorphic thread unifying these songs is the same that joins Ovid's tellings - through trials often culminating in loss and confusion, spirits transform to find new life in a shifting world.