Search - Tall Grass Captains of Greater Chicago :: She Moved Through

She Moved Through is one of those records with one foot in this world and one in the next, some half-remembered dream that suddenly startles us by its familiarity. The Tall Grass Captains describe a world where dented doors of dreary city streets open into great galactic vistas, where saints compete for the attention of princesses while satellites spy from above, and dragonflies hunt queens with the power to never let us die. ?For this record I was thinking of song-cycle-type records like the Zombies' Oddysey and Oracle with its majestic, melancholy pop," says songwriter Mark Mattson. "I admire artists like the Circulatory System, Neutral Milk Hotel, and the Flaming Lips, who do such an ingenious job of taking that baroque approach to rock music while still creating work that's timeless, hard-driving, valiant and moving." The album title itself nods to a haunting Irish ballad "She Moved Through the Fair." Throughout there is a tunefulness that suggests despite his hard rock background, Mattson never got over the AM pop radio of his early 70s childhood, where the likes of Sweet, Paul Simon, and the Miracles all once rubbed shoulders. This lends an air of fun and hope to the sometimes difficult, tragic subject matter. ?I couldn?t continue to write songs and pretend that these individual losses of family and friends, all young women, didn?t affect me to the core,? Mattson explains. ?But I didn?t want to make an album that just made people feel sad. I wanted to take that experience of loss and despair and unfairness, and make something about the mystery of it all, about the beauty of being alive.?