Willowbank Music
Michael Lawrence
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1. Derailment
2. The Bitter and the Sweet
3. Moorhens in the Snow
4. Murder Once Removed
5. Clovis Ventures Across the Ice
6. The Flooded World
7. Notes in the Family Tree
8. A Goat Called Flo
9. Gooseberries with Lisette
10. Flight Through the Forest
11. Out With the Lads
12. Panpipes in the Night
13. Trouble in the Storm
14. Miriam's Journey Home
A fine old riverside house.
A house where histories
and lives can change
in a heartbeat.
Where certainty has no place.
Welcome to Moorhens.
To read about the album
and the book, scroll down.
Moorhens - a novel about alternative lives and histories - is a c.650-page retelling for adults of a YA trilogy published as The Aldous Lexicon in Britain and The Withern Rise Trilogy in the U.S. In this version all the names are different, new material has been added, and the narrative focus has shifted to two of the female characters. Here, Miriam and Cal Rainey, the same person but of the opposite sex, live in the same house (Moorhens), have had the same view and most of the same experiences all their lives, but haven't the faintest inkling of one another's existence. When they meet, however, worlds change. And not only their worlds. Entire lives and futures are rearranged. The album's music reflects situations, incidents and settings described in the novel. The novel is available as a Kindle ebook: HERE U.S. or HERE UK.
As a matter of possible interest, the house that I call Moorhens - and called Withern Rise in the YA trilogy - is based on the one I was born in. The views described, the house's grounds, the adjoining village and nearby town are careful depictions of the real ones at various stages over the many years I have visited and chronicled them in one form or another. Below the music tracks you'll find a link to a reading, with video, of a poem - Personal Mythologies - about that childhood home.
2007-2010