Mike McClure Duo (Crow and Gazelle)
City Winery Presents Mike McClure Duo (Crow and Gazelle) on July 9th at 7:30pm
“Love and healing are at the center of the songs that Crow and Gazelle created.” - American Songwriter
“Simple and poignant.” - Americana-UK
“...a plea to not give up in the face of what seems like overwhelming odds. Take just one more breath, do just one more thing, and that’s the first step to healing…It’s beautiful, and poignan.” - Twangville
“...hallmarked by powerful two-part harmonies.” - Underground Music Collective
“The duo knows how to use spare instrumentation in a creative powerful manner without beingbombastic… Mike’s deep voice is a sharp contrast to the angelic tones of Chrislyn. Therein lies the attraction that is the elixir of their repertoire.” - Americana Highways
Mike McClure, is also lead singer and songwriter for the band The Great Divide, who skyrocketed in the late 1990s, signed by Atlantic Nashville, and went on to have a song cut by Garth Brooks.
Crow and Gazelle is the banner for the musical partnership of Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductee Mike McClure and his partner in life and in music, artist Chrislyn Lawrence. It is a hymnodic, moving collaboration borne out of the connection between two people healing, loving, and growing together. Their songs—built around their entangled close harmonies and sparse, reverent acoustic instrumentation—are wrought out of the love they have come to find for themselves and for each other. As Above Now So Below is an album centered on acceptance and growth in the face of pain... and on embracing the sacred nature within each and every one of us. The album, rooted in the process of honoring foundational roots while deconstructing harmful programming, encourages openness that looks within, rather than without, for purpose and meaning. In its raw vulnerability, the record approaches letting go (of control, of dangerous and unhelpful dogmas, and fear of the unknown) as the path to redemption and liberation. It takes its name from a well known axiom in an ancient Greek Hermetic text: “As above, so below; as below, so above.” The message of that expression is simple—the distance between the divine and the human is shorter than we think.
Through its joyful, reflective, and sometimes-sorrowful 13 songs, As Above Now So Below walks alongside the listener... through the depths of darkness, but ever holding space to see that through it is the only way to the other side. This harrowingly beautiful and raw debut outing is at its heart the narration of a divine love story—not only the one between two people, but between our hearts and our minds, our pasts and our futures, our knowns and our unknowns. It’s an offering to the shared possibility of love that vibrates through each and every one of us.
