Adey Bell
This is Adey Bell’s coming-of-age magnum opus. While wise beyond her earth years, Adey had yet to make the album she was capable of—until Silver Wheel. This is an emergence to address all your emergencies. Each and every track hovers at masterpiece proportions of in sight, penetrating depths, and uplifting latitude, longitude, and lightitude. Silver Wheel encompasses your Soul map, exactly where you are.
The multi-talented Adey Bell is a vocalist, pianist, film composer, and actor. Born under the “Big Sky” of Montana, she reflects this expanse in her music. As a singer/songwriter, she is compared to solo female virtuosos such as Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Fiona Apple, and Sarah McLachlan. My closest reference is the amazing Happy Rhodes, she of the five-octave range from a different planet altogether! Yet Adey’s stunningly angelic voice, unreal piano chops, and wide repertoire of stirring originals make her impossible to classify. Adey’s music is a collection of masterworks—songbooks from the other side. It is music for uncovering the lost pieces of yourself. James Hoskins’s heart-baring cello playing is entrancing while Adey’s pensive piano paints pictures of beings who know and show themselves.
Often hymn-like with cathedralesque harmonies, much of the music is steeped in yearning. Other songs are radical wake-up calls, starting with the opening “Lady Like,” the first single. From the overture, tango-like with wildly woven chords, she breaks the mold with cries, snarls, wails, bluesy shouts, and hollers, and the irresistible liberation of catharsis that settles deeply into a new view of life. Heart-tingling and spine-twining, Adey’s majestic songs, in her own words, “are fully alive in a conversation about living in modern times as an ancient soul, remembering us all into being. It is a musical Remembering of who She is.” In finishing Silver Wheel, she is poised and ready for touring the West Coast, starting in Marin on Sunday, March 25, with a FREE Concert at Unity in Marin (7 pm). As the debut of Adey’s “Venus Exalted Ensemble,” her live performance is a journey to the Underworld and back. oracle88.com
—LLOYD BARDE (LLOYDBARDE.COM)