Everyone is a captain of their own ship. At some point, even the best Captains can get lost. Everything from the current to the crew can influence our direction, but in the end, we must find our own way home.
Will you ever find the freedom that you’ve been aching for?
Purchase and Download “Old English” and other tracks from Catchlight:
The Project is a new song from Evan Hinshaw’s solo musical experiment Sly Like Fox.
It is the first song in the Sly Like Fox project to feature Evan’s home-made dulcimer at which he calls the Flintwood CSD.
Evan originally designed the dulcimer to work as a fun lead instrument in Catchlight. You can find hand-held strum dulcimers for sale but they are mostly built with a diatonic fret layout which makes it easy to play scales in a song but forces you to tune the instrument to whatever key the song is in.
The Flintwood C.S.D. (Chromatic Strum Dulcimer) has a complete chromatic fret layout which allows the instrument to stay in a form of standard tuning. It feels a little like playing the bass guitar but has a sound that is much like a mandolin.
Evan has developed a few prototypes in which he has future plans for building and selling CSDs and other small specialized folk instruments under the product name of Flintwood.
“When I play the CSD in Catchlight, I usually play it with a familiar folk mandolin strum style, but with this Sly Like Fox song, I wanted to think outside of the box and play the CSD in a progressive pick style to showcase the instrument in a different way.” -Evan Hinshaw
Evan calls this song, “The Project” because it reminds him of a parent and child working on a project together. He said he visualizes something like a woodworking project or some sort of craft project. The string section is the parent that has slower and patient guidance to it. The dulcimer is the child with a playful, bouncier tone to it. There are moments when the dulcimer pauses and the strings continue on as if the child is waiting for instruction from the parent.
You can find and purchase this song at: Sly Like Fox at BandCamp
You can also visit his Youtube Channel of other great content.
“Fly” is the latest track written and recorded by Strange Intuition, and then mixed and mastered at Catchlight’s studio.
“Just like most of our songs, Fly was written in the wee hours of the morning after yet another restless night of good company and guitars. Outside with the rising sun, a lively tune presented itself and we chose to pursue it. The lyrics were very impromptu and we just sang about the moment we were in. We watched a plane fly over us and pondered the fact that the passengers may be just starting their day while we were ending ours. They had no idea we were down there writing a song about them, and we had no idea where they were going. It all seemed quite serendipitous. In the end, we just had fun with it and romanticized the idea of flying away with nothing but a dream.”
-Shane Young of Strange Intuition
Purchase and Download “Fly” and other tracks from Strange Intuition:
Connect with Strange Intuition at: Facebook | Youtube | Bandcamp
This song was a long process for me in terms of lyricism. The guitar came to me quickly and I knew that the lyrics needed to really reach out at something. I had several moments during the sculpting of this song where I really just let go and let the music create the story and guide my words. I kept coming back to the phrase “Never can tell” which was fitting because that was truly the feeling behind this song. At any given moment while working on it I could be happy, frustrated, or thinking of what I was doing in life, and ultimately just not knowing. When all of these things started to combine I realized how important it was to let go, and not always “have the answer”.
It gets tiring to see everything put in a box like it always has to be a certain way when we know in our hearts it can change in an instant. The biggest forces in this world are just too far out of reach to put a finger on. There is peace within the journey and the search, and sometimes we learn more from that than just a simple answer.
-Shane Young
The Catchlight Project... 