By Brian Rill
The spiritual purpose of Nederland-based Darryl Purpose’s new collection purposes to insight mass awareness and, thereby, inspires world peace. A magical musical collaboration with eleven songs, co-written by author and songwriter Paul Zollo, Still The Birds soars like a black swan against the mediocre motley crew who unfurl Jolly Roger flags over a sea of modern music. Zollo’s wording begins to speak poignantly while substantively engaging the human experience of divinity.
The collection harkens back to a previous age, when journeymen songwriters called Jongleurs, searched scornful cities looking for loose pockets and unguarded ears. Sharing stories of cultural significance while examining a legacy of essential violence from the pathology of mass shootings to the horrific endemic of gang warfare in the streets of East L.A. The travesty of a poet’s death still mysteriously haunts us while Purpose sings his song, Baltimore, “Edgar Allan Poe lived his last days in the Bronx, but he died in Baltimore.”
Summoning a ghostly presence, Darryl shares a purely psychic connection with a song two hundred years in the making written on the hallowed ground of the American Civil War called Shiloh. Songs for poets and tunes to sooth the virtuous longing for love fill this work like the transcendental folk hymn Prince Of The Apple Town written for Bob Dylan’s namesake Dylan Thomas. “In our songs of salt and barley, in our temporary crowns, in the sun that’s young once only, Prince of the Apple Town.”
Darryl’s subdued guitar tones sound like dewdrops sliding off a beautiful lotus petal dripping into deep waters of the swamp. A soulful song, When Buddha Smiled At The Elephant contains the key to enlightenment, “And the whole wide world was singing of man and war and art. When Buddha smiled at the Elephant with his heart.” It’s the kind of song that helps a calloused heart understand the simple powers of love and opens the pores to better absorb enriching vitamins from sunlight.
Out of a deep meditation, melodies are separated and sequenced into perfect order. Phrases are sized at just the right magnitude as to slide easily across the eardrum. Can we resolve the past or believe in a future without war? The cosmic conscious is rising like steam upon the warm cadence of Mr. Purpose’s vocal tones. After drying your eyes, while crying within sins of the world you may choose to close them and feel the forgiveness alive within the Taoist messages available on this album.
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Jacques Attali, the economist wrote in his book Noise, “Noise is a weapon and music, primordially, is the formation, domestication, and ritualization of that weapon as a simulacrum of ritual murder.” If this shocking statement is indeed true, Darryl Purpose is courageously exploring outside of the creative box, discovering the places that politics won’t reach; where shadow and light penetrate and real people must make eminent choices. In my opinion, it is directly through music that we as human beings eventually begin to understand how to sublimate our strongest emotions. Just like the Buddha who, while being outweighed one hundred times by an angry stampeding elephant, only smiles humbly. www.darrylpurpose.com
Brian Joseph Rill is a detective, teacher and activist poet. He was voted Salida’s Best Musician in 2009 and is an award-winning Latin songwriter.