CRAZY LAUGHTER:
Seven Years with the Spirit of Arthur Rimbaud.
A New CD from Holly Tannen

– portrait of Rimbaud by Jean-Louis Forain, circa 1872

Holly Tannen has a new CD, her first since her 1999 recording, Rime of the Ancient Matriarch. It's entitled Crazy Laughter: Seven Years with the Spirit of Arthur Rimbaud.

From the liner notes:

At fifty-one I was living on the northern California coast. One foggy August day in a fit of boredom, I rented a movie: Total Eclipse, starring Leonardo di Caprio as Rimbaud. I hated it so much I watched it twice, and stormed around the house cursing at it. The next day I drove into Mendocino to return it. Walking down Ukiah street, suddenly Rimbaud was right there. It wasn't possession trance - I was still there. But it wasn't imagination either. I took down my yellowed copies of Illuminations and A Season In Hell.

These aren't poems, they're spells!

Was Rimbaud, as he claimed, a musician who has invented something like the key of love? Was he, as I have come to suspect, the heir to a long-suppressed European shamanic tradition?

The past seven years Holly has devoted herself to Rimbaud's infamous, inept, obstinate, mysterious work of creating a poetic language accessible to all the senses. Crazy Laughter includes songs from Holly's one-woman, one-entity show Practical Alchemy: An Exquisitely Perverse Grace, Holly's settings of Rimbaud's poems, and a couple of Holly's satirical songs about life in Mendocino.

The musicians: Shira Kammen, Danny Carnahan, Sylvia Herold, Maureen Brennan, Francy Vidal and Edmond Badoux, Marcia Sloane, Michael Hubbert, Charlie Hancock, Adam Miller, and Manose. Produced by Holly Tannen and Danny Carnahan

* Crazy Laughter * The Edge Between * Marie Laveau * Bonobo Wannabee * Brownies for Breakfast * Are You Sleepin', Maggie * Painted Toenails * Lay This Body Down * The Drunken Boat * Dawn * La Femme du Berger (The Shepherd's Wife) * Sleeping Rough * The Soul Knows Its Own * Alembic (The Boy with the Tortured Heart) *

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