Événement

Sarah Lee Guthrie + Johnny Irion

A lot can happen in five years, and for the husband-and-wife duo Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion, the time between Exploration, their first album together in 2005, and Bright Examples (Ninth Street Opus Records, Feb. 22, 2011), their new, full-length collaborative project, has been one nonstop whirlwind of activity. Not only has the couple toured extensively both as a duo and as part of the "Guthrie Family Rides Again" tour (with Sarah Lee's dad, Arlo Guthrie), they've also released the children's album Go Waggaloo (Smithsonian Folkways), a live DVD entitled Folk Song, a
solo album by Johnny (Ex Tempore), parented their two young daughters and moved from South Carolina to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, near where Sarah Lee was raised.
"We've been working really hard," confirms Guthrie. "We even built a house. We felt very creative in South Carolina but we're in a totally different space now. We had started another album together before we moved but it just wasn't right. This one is."
Bright Examples finds Guthrie and Irion taking their patented country-rock sound and tilting it in a direction Guthrie describes as "more atmospheric or psychedelic, sort of dreamy but colorful." Recorded at Dreamland Studios near Woodstock, N.Y., the album features a dozen original compositions, chosen from more than 50 they'd accumulated over the past five years. "It was really great to have that many songs," says Guthrie, "but at the same time, what do you do with the rest? They weren't any less good. We just picked the songs that we thought went together well."