Local songstress Ella Longpre (full disclosure: she is a former editorial intern here at the Advo) has self-released a CD, Dust Be Your Savior. The CD pleased me before I even stuck it in my CD drive on my Dell: The disc is white with the outline of a horse hand-sketched in black. A hand-crafted insert on regular printer paper contains a song list typed in old-school typewriter style type set. (Plus the CD was hand-delivered by Miss Longpre right to me at my desk. I didn't even have to stand up.) The first thing that caught my attention was Ella's voice. Soulful, pitch perfect and somehow emotive of a strange, deep knowledge about impermanence and other Buddhist-type things, Ella's voice is like a combo of Norah Jones, Bjork, Ani DiFranco and Leonard Cohen.
Besides seven originals, Dust Be Your Savior also features Birds, written by Neil Young, Bang Bang, written by Sonny Bono, and My Girl My Girl, a traditional American folk song also recorded by the late Kurt Cobain. While I thoroughly enjoyed all the tracks, the tinny recording quality (she recorded the CD in her bedroom) ocasionally is distracting. The CD is still worth acquiring, however, I just hope that for Ella's next CD she can get herself and that fantastic voice into a studio.
