Description
Strings & Sonnets is an instrumental/spoken word album by the American singer, songwriter, and guitarist Phil Keaggy with poet/author Malcolm Guite, independently released on Strobie Records in November 2024. The album was produced, recorded, and mixed by Phil Keaggy.
Featuring Phil Keaggy on guitar and poetry by Malcolm Guite.
Album Liner Notes
When I came to discover the gifts and talents of Malcom Guite, I was amazed at his keen sense of communicating biblical truth and spiritual insight. To read his works is wonderful and moves the heart, but to hear him read the words he’s composed adds incredible depth and wonder as his speaking voice reaches both the ears and the heart!
I was delighted that he was so willing to have me create music behind a collection of his own readings. His spoken words kindled just the right notes, chords and melody lines to be the appropriate backdrop to this tapestry of poetry and truth. I have friends who have told me, upon hearing these sonnets put to music, that they encouraged devotion and stirred their hearts. I too am a recipient.
Thank you, Malcom – also, a big thank you to Tom Gulotta for believing in this project and not giving up. Also my sincere thanks to Dan Turner as well as to Kevin Belmonte for being in our corner for this release. May it bring a deep blessing to many! – Phil Keaggy
***
The poet Paul Verlaine said in his poem “Art Poétique” that poetry should be “…la musique avant toute chose” it should be music, first and foremost. And that is true. All poetry aspires to become a kind of music, something I suggested in a line of my poem “The Singing Bowl”: “stay with the music, words will come in time.” That line was of course a nod to Verlaine, but is also an essential part of my own poetic credo. So you can imagine how thrilled I was not only to meet so superlative a musician as Phil Keaggy, but then, wonder of wonders, to discover that we might make something new together blending his music and my poetry! The idea arose on a day that was already blessed with pipes, and beer, and long conversation about our mutual admiration for C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, and of course for an art we shared with them, the fine art of pipe smoking.
I recited “As The Ruin Falls,” a poem of Lewis’s, spontaneously amidst the conversation, and before I knew it Phil had his guitar out and was playing the beautiful setting he had already written for it. I was entranced, as I always am, by the subtlety, the nuance and the undercurrent of joy in all his playing, but then he turned to me and asked me to recite some of my own poetry and he began to improvise with it playing through and around it, giving my words new wings.
He was drawing something new from my poetry and perhaps my poems were drawing something new from him, and so this new album, Strings and Sonnets began to emerge. It begins with “Singing Bowl,” my poem about the music of poetry and moves on to my sonnet in tribute to C.S. Lewis, written for the 50th anniversary of his death. From there, with Music and Lewis as our guardian angels, we weave our way through the psalms, the poetry of scripture, to some of my sonnets on the stations of the cross and the sayings of Jesus, we even weave in a little celebration of pipe smoking, until we circle back to my poetic reflection on psalm 133, that great psalm of gathering, community and communion, and find that It is indeed a good and joyful thing to gather in one love and in one place. – Malcolm Guite
CD tracklist:
01. The Singing Bowl – 1:24
02. C.S. Lewis – 1:36
03. Patterns [Tree & Leaf] (for Tolkien) – 1:25
04. On Psalm 150 – 1:05
05. On Psalm 96 – 1:10
06. As If (Matthew 5:42) – 1:13
07. I Am The Light (John 8:12) – 1:32
08. Like Unto Leaven (Matthew 13:33) – 1:46
09. The Anointing At Bethany – 1:20
10. Crucifixion (Stations of the Cross pt. 1) – 1:26
11. Father Forgive – 1:12
12. The Cross (Stations of the Cross pt. 2) – 1:12
13. Easter Dawn (Stations of the Cross pt. 3) – 1:15
14. A Kind Of Tune – 1:15
15. I Will Be With You (Matthew 28:20) – 1:15
16. Psalm 133/Ecce, Quam bonum! – 1:57
Bonus Tracks:
17. Christ The King – 1:08
18. Smoke Rings From My Pipe – 2:23
19. For Andrew Lazo – 1:14
20. John Donne – 1:14
21. The Strings [instrumental only] – 21:26
22. The Skiving Story (Bandcamp exclusive) – 6:04
Note: Released on both CD (feat. liner notes by Phil & Malcom and an essay by Chesterton biographer Kevin Belmonte + with 4 bonus tracks not on the LP) and 12-inch vinyl LP (the LP has all the sonnets on side one with background music, and all the music by itself on side two). Available at Bandcamp: https://philkeaggyfriends.bandcamp.com/album/strings-sonnets
Journey to the Stage, Ep. 78 (December 27, 2024): Malcolm Guite & Phil Keaggy discuss their new album Songs & Sonnets.
SOJOURNS, AND SONG
by Kevin Belmonte. . . that land of promise,
which, in truth, abounds with
whatever, in our journey
through life, can best refresh
and strengthen usThese lines, Christian reflections penned by William Wilberforce, find the heart of the album Phil Keaggy and Malcolm Guite have created in Strings & Sonnets. The two are travellers well-met, set upon a road of artistry. This is an album resonant with traveller’s tales: to see a distant door, beckoning, discern moments near “the holy wood” – the cross of Christ, or traverse a forest, close to familiar fields, flourishing – made by the Lord of the “better country,” whom they know, and help us see.
Here all is rendered, and secure: a haven of time, where hope lives, and seeks the heart.
Here, we glimpse a far hill, and a keep of ancient wisdom, love, and redemption.
Or we may pause, along the wayside, to hear the wind move a sea of inland grass – then set a pipe alight – as Tolkien, or C.S. Lewis might, when sunset gathers a day’s last colours.
Such moments bring a yearning, for the best things of life, or things that have yet to be. And these are but names for the sixteen poems, which Malcolm Guite has written and read, or lines of melody, on guitar, and other instruments, that Phil Keaggy weaves in this soundscape.
Seamlessly the verse, and music, are one. Beautifully, they hallow one another. We find fellowship, and honour – firelight, or the sacred page. Should we seek the place of great good, bestowed, it is not far to find. Stations of the Cross, places of homage (to writers like Tolkien and Lewis), moments of home and hearth, psalm settings, or scenes elsewhere in the New Testament – all have their place in this reverent cycle of music and spoken word, beginning with the lovely meditation that is “The Singing Bowl.”
It summons hope, and the heart. Amid our harried, often-troubled world, here is a place of benison. Keaggy and Guite invest a deep tradition that has a modern counterpart in the music of Van Morrison, recurring through Hymns to the Silence; or the closing doxology, from the Gospel of John, chapter one, that graces Michael Card’s “Overture to the Trilogy.”
Strings & Sonnets joins the company of these works, in ways that nourish the soul. From one track to another, we have all manner of welcome, much-needed things – and new moments of disclosing, with every listen through. That is the way of high art.
With chamber music, litany, or the fall of lambent sound, this album shines with gifts.
Here, we walk with Lewis and Tolkien as friends, find new and vivid poems, and then, keep company with seasons of contemplation – all the while, to know, as Wilberforce also wrote: the humble, quiet-giving hope of being reconciled to God.
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