Canada's roots/swing duo "Over The Moon" are totally immersed in real cowboy country.
When you set up home in the foothills of Alberta's Rocky Mountains, it's inevitable there will be a strong sense of place and the rhythms of the land when you start to play music.
The couple's debut album, mostly written and recorded on the ranch where they live, reflects the pulse of life living in a territory that is rugged and beautiful.
It's a wild ride from 40's western swing and Appalachian old-time, to cowboy blues, all featuring their meant-to-be vocals and a wide array of acoustic instruments.
Suzanne Levesque and Craig Bignell are both award winning multi-instrumentaist/vocalists that have spent most of their lives as studio and live performance musicians for other artists. After they discovered that their voices blended together so well that people were often moved to tears upon hearing them sing together, they decided to try their own project.
Simple and sweet, from the title track, "Moondancer" (given to them by their neighbour Ian Tyson) to "Turtle Mountain" which documents the 1903 Crowsnest Pass disaster known as the Frank Slide, all of their material seems to have a common thread the speaks the Canadian west.
Opening with Bailey Rogers and John Park Wheeler
Jon Park-Wheeler was born in Ottawa, Ontario at some point in the previous millennium, and declines to be more specific on the topic. Carbon-14 dating performed on mustache clippings, however, reveals his date of birth to be sometime after the Roaring Twenties, and sometime before the advent of Gangsta Rap.
He cannot remember a time in his life when he did not play music. (This means that either he has been playing forever, or has a faulty memory. We choose to endorse the former, without ruling out the latter entirely.) Like most children of his era, he was dragged kicking and screaming to piano lessons when he was barely out of diapers, and in spite of himself acquired the rudiments of music.
