Discover and Endure - Steve Garrett
Songs written inspired by stories and experience of landscape, exploration and human endurance.
A collection of recordings by musicial Steve Garrett.
Track Listing
1. Discover and Endure
Different sections in different keys imagine different characters within a group hauling sledge, ending with the leader imagining the church bells on their return home - only to realise at the end that they are still trudging across the snow. As Charles Turley (1914) wrote in The Voyages of Capitan Scott: 'For ninety-three days they had plodded over a vast snow-field and...striven and endured to the limit of their powers'.
2. Summer River
Inspired by the sunlight shimmering of the water of the River Dee on the edge of Cairngorms National Park.
3. Lament for the Children
A piping tune from the piobaireachd tradition by Padruig Mor MacCrimmon. Dedicated to those who have endured the loss of a child.
4. Midwinter Gathering
The main seasonal celebration in southern polar traditions, mirroring Christmas & Hogmanay in the northern hemisphere.
5. Egdon Heath
Gustav Holst' masterpiece adapted to the guitar, revealing bi-tonality, tricky time signitures, bluesy scales, folky tunes and jazzy chords.
6. Lassie Lie Near Me
A folk song set over a minimalist pattern, with romantic and restorative words as collected by Robert Burns: 'A' that I hae endur'd lassie, my dearie; gere in thy arms is cur'd, lassie lie near me.'
7. Clifftop Storm
A song inspired by Garrett's time getting caught out when camping in extreme conditions at Goosenecks State Park in Utah.
8. Black Sail Hut
Inspired by a stay at a remote hostel in the Lake District, where a friend of Garrett's who works in Antarctica reminded him of the work of Nan Shepherd whose book The Living Mountain ends with the visionary words:
'to know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain'.
Album jacket features stunning images taken aboard the RRS Discovery