Steve Wynn - Crossing Dragon Bridge

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Steve Wynn - Crossing Dragon Bridge

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Steve Wynn - Crossing Dragon Bridge
EAC/Flac (tracks) + Log - no Cue = 341 MB | MP3 320 kbps = 128 MB | Scans 300 dpi | Rs.com
Rock | Blue Rose Records #447 | 2008

Booklet notes
The days during my three weeks in Ljubljana were pretty simple. I would wake up early and leave my apartment on Trubarjeva Street and cross Dragon Bridge in search of a good cup of coffee which I would sip, watching the vendors in the open market as they sold cabbage, purses, cheap watches and anything else that might be worth a Euro or two. I'd check out this panorama of commerce and barter and think about which song I would drag into the daily laboratory that was Chris Eckman's home studio.
I had never made a record like this before. I was in Slovenia, far from my New York City apartment and in a musical world that had shrunk down to just two people - me and Chris, the multi-talented producer and founder of the Walkabouts. He had been wanting to make a record with me for many years and seemed particularly intent on stripping things down to my voice and my acoustic guitar and then building up another universe from there.
No band. No session players (until later). No passing of the baton in this relay race. Even Chris would hesitate when I tried to get him to play something. Guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals - if I could do it, I had to do it. And that's why "Crossing Dragon Bridge" sounds different from other records I've done before but also more like the sound inside my head than anything I've done before.
But it's not a record I would have made in New York. Or in Tucson. Or in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Moscow or Mali. It's not like a record I would make on the moon or on Mars or in New Jersey. It has the sound and the mood and the sights and the overall vibe of Ljubljana. I swallowed the city whole and then waited for the meal to work itself into a digestive hallucination before spitting it out again each day at Chris' place. And then it was back for a pint of Union beer by the river before starting all over again.
When I left Slovenia a few weeks later both of us knew we had something special. And then we proceeded to add the extra bits that would take the experience further. An eight-piece orchestra was added in Prague to a bunch of the songs and a woman's choir in Ljubljana was added to others. Linda Pitmon, Kirk Swan, Chris Cacavas and Tim Adams (Teenage Prayers) chimed in from New York, Los Angeles and Germany bringing in elements of familiarity from my past and present.
Finally the whole thing was filtered through the creative and impressionistic mixing skills of Tucker Martine, tweaked by legendary mastering engineer Greg Calbi and turned into the record that you hold in your hands. It's a snapshot, a dream, an acid flashback, a tourist guide, a midnight snack, a morning cup of coffee - it's the other world that happened around me and inside my head for three weeks last September. I hope you enjoy taking the trip back there with me.
STEVE WYNN
New York City, February 2008

AMG Review by Thom Jurek
According to his liner notes, when Steve Wynn went to Ljubljana, Slovenia to make a record with producer Chris Eckman (songwriter, guitarist, and founder of the Walkabouts who also does work for Slovenian television) at the latter's studio, he never expected to be told he had to do everything himself. Wynn had some songs for this collaboration, but others were written on the spot and he played virtually everything on the set, from guitar, bass, and keyboards to vocals and backing vocals. Apparently Eckman played a bit but was very hesitant to do so. In three weeks, after spending plenty of time observing life there in Ljubljana, forgetting his life in New York for a bit, and generally being a stranger in a strange land, he came up with a collection of 13 songs that talked about everything he felt there to be sure, but more than this, he'd come up with an astonishing collection of very diverse tunes that were different than anything he'd ever written or recorded before. After Wynn finished his sessions, Eckman added a local women's choir, a chamber orchestra from Prague. Later he added overdubbed sessions by Chris Cacavas, Linda Pitmon, Kirk Swan, and the Teenage Prayers' Tim Adams, in the United States and Germany. Tucker Martine mixed the entire album in Seattle. The end result is Crossing Dragon Bridge, an album that mixes lushly orchestrated outsider pop (the title track and the nearly Brechtian "Wait Until You Get to Know Me"); mutant Americana ("She Came," and "Annie and Me"); beautifully textured garagey psychedelia ("Love Me Anyway" and "God Doesn't Like It"); darkly colored Baroque rock ("Bring the Magic" and "I Don't Need This"), and hauntingly beautiful singer/songwriter fare ("Punching Holes in the Sky"). In other words, this is a dazzling array of material, but all of it is perfectly suited to Wynn as both a songwriter and as a singer. Lyrically it's the most sophisticated thing he's ever recorded, head and shoulders above the standard fare from his peers and by many new kids on the block as well (no pun intended). He's set himself a new high-water mark to be sure. Ultimately, it's a songwriter's album but one that is full of surprise, delight, and a sense of poetry that is wiry, tough, and tender. By turns epic and intimate, literate, witty and poetic, this is Wynn's masterpiece.