Austin, Texas-based singer/songwriter Claudia Gibson has had a winding road in music, but her upcoming album The Fields of Chazy is a testament to her resilience and her continued reflection on the role of music in her life. It arrives on March 1st, 2024. Having played clubs as a teen, studied music in college, fronted bands in her 20s, she ended up taking time out to raise children. Called back by her muse, she headed back to songwriting and performing.
With her upcoming album The Fields of Chazy, Gibson “weaves stories about lives, events and emotions – true and imagined – that encapsulate the past, present and future of our shared human experience.” The title track was particularly inspired by true events from her family’s history. The album was Produced by Walt Wilkins and Ron Flynt and brings together traditional and contemporary sounds around an acoustic base.
Today, we’re very pleased to debut Claudia Gibson’s new song “Rain” from Fields of Chazy here at Wildfire Music + News. The track will arrive for streaming or download this week on February 16th, 2024.
This is a song that from the outset conveys a strong mood and depth of emotion, and with its bluesy intro building in Folk accents, it’s no surprise that the vocals and lyrics soon bring in a story of loss. Without knowing who the “girl” is, often addressed as “you” in the song, that Gibson is speaking about, we can discern that a person of great beauty and personal presence has left the world behind and the world is poorer for it. There’s a certain tone that Gibson takes which is quite refreshing in a song about grief, a sharp-eyed look at loss that testifies to the experience of it without trying to blunt that edge too much. It would be understandable to craft a song that softens the blow, but Gibson instead creates a space to bring the natural elements and the world itself into this sense of loss and really give the human soul a place to feel. As she says, “sometimes all it does is rain.” And that rain, she elsewhere adds, is “like the human condition”.
Gibson also suggests that this person has had a difficult life herself, and so in some ways, shaking off “earthly chains” seems like a freeing thing. A certain attitude of boldness is also suggested in the departed who “ain’t coming back.” The dual aspects of hardship and loss, and beauty and freedom, continue to play off each other in the song and the sound has a great deal to do with reinforcing that. It moves between raw emotion and acceptance with a very distinctive rhythm that’s supported by the vocal delivery which touches on Soul traditions. That rhythm subtly suggests a movement forward, that even this difficult state moves on. Whether you come away from hearing “Rain” with a sense of grim reality, or of hope, depends on your own cast of mind. There’s a certain victory that Gibson can claim in giving appropriate room and time to allow for both in a song about being left behind.
Claudia Gibson shares about writing the song:
When I heard that singer Valerie Carter had died in March 2017, I was so sad – she had been a lifelong favorite of mine, and her soulful singing had transfixed me as a young teen. As I sat processing the news of her passing, a giant black cloud suddenly appeared over my Texas hill country home, and the skies opened up with a massive downpour. That afternoon, I walked over to my studio and wrote this song.
The 2020 COVID shutdown and its aftermath slowed Gibson’s music momentum, but opening for Walt Wilkins twice in 2022 and making his acquaintance again when performing at the Corpus Christi Songwriters Festival in 2023 was the start of a musical friendship.
Walt Wilkins produced Claudia’s album The Fields of Chazy in the summer of 2023, alongside co-Producer and engineer Ron Flynt, at Jumping Dog Studios in Austin. The album features many prominent Austin musicians.
On The Fields of Chazy, Claudia Gibson plays acoustic guitars and performs lead vocals, Chris Beall plays electric guitars, Rich Brotherton provides acoustic guitar, tenor guitar, mandolins, and cittern, John Chipman adds drums and percussion, Bart de Win plays accordion, Mark Epstein plays electric and acoustic bass, Ron Flynt plays bass, piano, and organ, Warren Hood plays the fiddle, Geoff Queen adds pedal steel guitar, Ray Rodriguez contributes cajon and percussion, Tina Mitchell Wilkins performs harmonies, and Walt Wilkins adds harmonies and percussion.
While the album’s title song tells the true story of Claudia Gibson’s paternal grandfather, Joseph Thibodeau, an upstate NY farmer in a small ex-Quebecois community, Gibson’s maternal grandmother Bessie is the primary figure in the song “Promised Land”, which portrays the experience of Eastern European 20th century immigrants through the eyes of a young teenager. Other tracks run the gamut of storytelling, personal and historical, in compelling ways, along with one traditional Scottish song, reflecting Gibson’s Celtic heritage, “The Night Visiting Song.”
