Clatterhead.com

She’s got an extra rib – 13 of them on one side rather
than the conventional dozen.

Maybe there’s a connection between that and the
hauntingly beautiful voice, hypnotic melodies and colorfully offbeat lyrics she
brings to the music of Two Loons for Tea.

Jonathan, as far as he knows, has the standard number on
both sides. But he mirrors his partner’s asymmetry with his visionary musical
constructions.

Two Loons for Tea returns five years after its second
album -- the critically acclaimed, challenging yet seductive Looking for
Landmarks -- and having forged intense bonds with an ever-growing legion of
loyal fans in North America and Europe, have delivered Nine Lucid Dreams.
Independent in spirit and in business (with their growing Sarathan Records
label), the album at once delivers on the promise of its predecessors and opens
up new artistic vistas and possibilities for the Seattle-based duo.

Their first two albums and expressive concerts have
earned comparisons to Massive Attack, Zero 7, Cocteau Twins, Portishead, Psapp,
and Rickie Lee Jones, among many others. And Sarah and Jonathan cite a vast
range of influences from Aphex Twin to Xenakis, most of the way through the
alphabet. All that now, though, seems at best mere starting points.

Recorded in part at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studio in
Texas with such friends as drummer Matt Chamberlain (Pearl Jam, Tori Amos),
keyboard master Patrick Warren (Michael Penn, Fiona Apple) and strings wizard
Eyvind Kang (John Zorn, Blonde Redhead) helping out, Nine Lucid Dreams brings
the alchemy of Sarah’s hauntingly beautiful vocals and colorfully imaginative
lyrics combined with Jonathan’s vivid musical vision to full fruition. 

The title is a perfect fit for the songs that are both
crystal clear portrayals and vivid visions worthy of Jung. The atmospheres can
shift from being as lush as the Seattle landscapes to as arid and spare as the
west-Texas desert, the images range from intimate confessions to colorful character
sketches. Very much not about trends and hairdos. But what is it about?

The tingle.

“Our
involvement with music is about making a connection with something larger than
ourselves,” Jonathan says. “It’s that whole-body tingling feeling we get when
we’re recording or performing and alerts us that we’re on the right path.” But
it’s not just for them. It’s for the audience. “To hear back reports from
others that they’ve experienced the same tingling at home or at shows is
wonderful. It’s about creating a community of feeling.”

They’ve certainly created an intriguing community in the
character-filled (in both senses of character) array of songs on Nine Lucid
Dreams – from the circus-denizens of “The Strongest Man in the World” to the
defiant prostitute in “Marietta,” from the delicate yearning of “Tragically
Hip” to the Beat surrealist narration of “Consuela” (voiced by Jonathan in his
frontman debut) and from the fogged impressionistic account of a hair-stylist
friend’s murder in “Eyebrows Are Nature’s Makeup” to the space-age
jazzbo-hoedown “Dixie It Up!”

Jonathan and Sarah are an unlikely community themselves.
His background is academia and technology, with experience in biostatistics,
human genetics, climate change studies, evolutionary biology, Internet
development and such, combined with an incurable entrepreneurial bug, is
manifested most recently in the expanding operations of Sarathan Records, with
a roster that includes releases by Airpushers (two members of the Black Eyed
Peas’ band), Abra Moore, The Purrs and the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow
Players. Jonathan’s past shows a knack for initiating and developing successful
enterprises since grad school, with the growing Sarathan following suit.

Sarah, in contrast, was raised by a free-spirited single
mom, living in such locales as San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury, next to a nudist
colony in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Spokane Washington, with Sarah carrying
the bohemian lifestyle into adulthood.

When they met in the ‘90s, he was playing the Seattle open-mic
circuit and outdoor festivals, and she was singing in an R&B revue. They
clicked immediately, hooked up with some ex-members of The New Bohemians, first
as Loon, but as the line-up contracted to the duo, the name expanded to Two
Loons for Tea.

Nine Lucid Dreams was not necessarily a quicker record
than Looking For Landmarks, but the process and results were more fluid than in
the past. After an enforced three-year hiatus (“I almost amputated my left
index finger in a bizarre accident involving a butter knife and a buffalo
burger,” Jonathan reports), the two sought a new environment for recording,
setting up shop at Willie Nelson’s digs in the hills of Texas rather than in
rainy Seattle.

“Because of our improvisational recording process, the
environment made our music a little sunnier this time, with a touch of the
Southwest desert,” Jonathan says.

And to keep the process fresh, Sarah tried some new
techniques.

“I tried on this album to get out of my own head, which
I really enjoyed,” she says. “In the past, the subject matter has been personal
either from me or close friends. In Nine Lucid Dreams, I also borrowed from
movies. ‘Strongest Man in the World,’ was inspired by Bye Bye Brazil, which is
about an unlikely crew of characters that who all end up in a traveling
Brazilian circus.”

Revisiting methods used on previous records, she cut up
words  and phrases and allowed
chance into the creative process by drawing them out of a bag or scrambling
them on the floor.

“Pretty much all of the songs on Nine Lucid Dreams were
done that way, except for ‘Strongest Man in the World’ and ‘Stand on Your
Head,’ which is also from a film, about the writer Janet Frame from New
Zealand, who passed away just after I wrote the song. She had a difficult life
growing up and didn’t fit in to her surroundings. It was inspiring to me
because I think I always felt a little odd growing up, slightly left of center,
like she did, but she found a way to channel her loneliness and discontent into
her art.”

Through it all, Jonathan has worked to blend a wide
spectrum of musical aesthetics into a singular whole – a process he relates to
his PhD research at Yale in the field of speciation. “To a large degree, what
makes Two Loons for Tea's music unique is that it is a hybrid of many distinct
musical species . . . rock, pop, jazz, classical, funk, folk, and various
ethnic musics,” he says. “And yet, despite the many parental sources, it has a
distinct identity of its own.”

It’s Jonathan and Sarah who sound like proud parents as
they discuss their hopes for the album. “We want to do this one right,”
Jonathan says. “This time, I’m staying away from butter knives and buffalo
burgers. I don’t want to miss that thrill when people tell us a song has a
thematic tie to their lives”

“Or even,” Sarah notes, “when they say, ‘We made a baby
to one of your songs! Or ‘your music made me get lucky.’ We hear this one a
lot! And they share far too many details with us. TMI! Strange to think we’re
in the bedroom with them.”

 As they said: the tingle.