A Seasonal Wish to You - All Through the Night

Today I released a live-in-concert video of All Through the Night, a traditional Welsh song that I have always loved and had to include on Local Honey. I timed the video's release to coincide with the holiday season and, while the song in no way reflects the event itself, I was also thinking about the Dec. 6th commemoration of the mass shooting at the École Polytechnique in which 14 women lost their lives 29 years ago. The piece has so many layers to it: it is a beautiful, soothing lullaby, a heart wrenching farewell, an epitaph to a king (in some versions), and for many, can be heard as a Christmas song. My reasons for recording it were very personal and I placed it where I did in the album's sequence to signify an elegy of sorts to my work with Two Roads Home, my pop-folk duo that ended a wonderful 20+-year run awhile ago. It was time to put "one young dream" to bed and find my own voice. The piano arrangement on the record so lovingly does that for me and it made recording the song a true joy; as did singing with my best friend of 30 years, Seana Lee Wood. Having her voice beside mine brings me even more comfort and courage to wish the past all the best and move on with love and compassion.

Please enjoy this gorgeous live video shot at the October 13th launch concert for Local Honey and catch the studio version below as well. My thanks to Gisèle Holt and Chris Marcucci for shooting and editing it respectively, and to my beautiful vocalists Anna Marie Therrien and Anne Gingras, as well as my drummer Bryden Chernoff, for this live version. I arranged it especially for our voices. 

All the very best for the season to every one of you. May you sing in the darkness. May you lovingly put the past to bed and courageously look to the future from this gift of the present. And, as the Welsh would say, "May mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance."

abby 

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