Next year marks the 20th anniversary of Ray Lynch’s last studio album. As you recall, I got Deep Breakfast as a wedding gift. I picked up The Sky Of Mind shortly after. No Blue Thing was released soon after that. I had been listening to Ray Lynch for about 5 years when Nothing Above My Shoulders But The Evening hit the stores.
Again with the unusual album names. I’m sure that it has some deeper Zen meaning. I remixed my Ray Lynch car tape and renamed it Nothing Above My Shoulders But The Deep Blue Sky Of Mind.
This album carried on in the tradition of No Blue Thing. It has the same kind of musical textures and composition, very enjoyable but again, not quite as infectious as Deep Breakfast.
The real question is What has happened to Ray? Why 20 years and still not new music? When I bought Nothing Above My Shoulders But The Evening, I thought that I’d be enjoying a new Ray Lynch album every 3 or 4 years. That was about the schedule he was keeping up to that point.
As I sit and listen to this album, every track is familiar. I’ve heard them so many times but yet the familiarity is distant like seeing the same teller at the bank but never interacting. I know the songs but not be name. I think that this is primarily due to the fact that I’ve heard things songs as part of a New Age Shuffle so many times over the past 15 years. The songs randomly appear. I can recognize that they are Ray’s but I don’t know the track names Like I do with his previous 3 albums and even those are starting to slip away.
Her Knees Deep In Your Mind
Ivory
The Vanished Gardens Of Cordoba