We Walked in Song

Tenth creation of The Innocence Mission

(written for the Bagpipe)

Karen and Don Peris make songs that put sound to gentle inquisitiveness. They are the musical equivalent of what you feel when a good friend cocks his head, looks at you with soft understanding, and asks a question that changes your wisdom and your vision.

Over their time playing together (since their high school years), the husband and wife and their bassist Mike Bitts have perfected their mix. Clear quiet acoustic and electric guitars, piano, and a solid bass line, with a few organ riffs, make for a complete atmosphere shift: wherever you are, you are in someone’s home when you are listening to The Innocence Mission.

Their new album, We Walked in Song, discusses such old themes as love, leavings, losses, and contentment amidst the bold and the mundane. But while the ideas are ever-present (as, indeed, they are in life), each song feels like a new porthole into someone’s little existence: like the way, in a picture, the incidental background figure with an odd facial expression catches your attention and makes you wonder what was really going on behind the poses.

With truly poetic lyrics and some hints of the rhythms and chords of polka, the album is about being away. Karen sings, “And I think of you in the colors of the world./ And I did meet you in the brotherhood of man/ When I was traveling a long way from my home/ And you are a friend of mine.” Distance and absence, but friendship all the same, she seems to say, are the life of us all.

Karen’s voice embraces paradox and pulls you into her music. Both fragile and firm, joyful and near to tears, childish and wise, her sound is unique and could convince you of anything. But she doesn’t need to; you feel that it’s all true; it’s all part of being the brotherhood of man.