After recording several albums with a strong jazz orientation, singer-songwriter Marc Jordan has opted to refocus his creative energies.
The award-winning tunesmith has chosen this point in his career to revisit the kind of pop music that first brought him major commercial success in the late 1970s (with songs like Marina del Rey) and continued to generate hits for him throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, both as a performer and as a go-to songwriter for artists like Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker, Cher, Natalie Cole and Bette Midler.
Jordan’s latest project, Crucifix In Dreamland, is no retro excursion however.
While he may draw on some of the same influences that factored into his songwriting back then, he has proven himself once more to be an artist given to exploring new ideas and new concepts with an open mind and an adventurous spirit that demands he not sit still but continually expand his musical horizons.
In the case of Crucifix In Dreamland, that translated to Jordan collaborating with a stellar group of people that included Alison Krauss, Ron Sexsmith, Hawksley Workman, Luke McMaster and Dala.
The key player on the team, however, was Chris Bilton, who not only served as the record’s producer but co-wrote 10 of the 12 new songs featured here and played piano.
Jordan and Bilton, who earned critical acclaim for scoring films, proved a formidable duo.
Oddly enough, this wasn’t the record they initially set out to make.
As Jordan explains it, they were in the studio working on another project when the idea hit him.
“The moment I saw him play the piano I had an inkling I could write with him,” Jordan said. “We just started writing songs, and it evolved into this very filmic piece of music.”
They had an interesting approach to making records or, at least, to making this record.
“Almost every song on the record started musically with me first,” Bilton says. “I’ll literally send Marc a finished track of just music that I’ve arranged in my head and put sections in. It’s like a four-minute journey, and Marc says he feeds off my playing. He does his Marc Jordan thing on it, and he’ll then sing melody and lyrics over what I create musically.”
The lyrics Jordan penned for these songs are very personal in nature.
In his liner notes he describes the album as a look back at life, at longing and at love.
That look back has been filtered, he says, through the lens of his dyslexic love for his wife, singer-songwriter Amy Sky.
