Evening Song by Michael Johnathon

”

The young warrior looked quietly as he contemplated his fate.

“Now look at the darkness above you.”

And the young man raised his eyes heavenward.

“See each star, shining so bright in the dark heavens?”

And the young man gazed into the starry night like never before.

“This is the resting place of your love,” said his grandfather.

“I don’t understand,” said the young man.

His great grandfather explained,

“My son, Love comes to us from the darkness below. It fills your heart and your spirit. When it is dies, it ascends into the heavens above.

The young man held his fist over his breaking heart.

“Each time a man falls in love and that love is broken and leaves him far away, this is where the spirit of love goes to rest. Each star in the heavens is the love that some one held in their heart until it was released back into the nightime sky.”

His great grandfather placed his arm around him and said,

“The end of love is really the beginning of love. When I look in the sky I search for the star that is the love I had for your great grandmother. Our love lives on long after us as a star in the nightime sky.”

This beautiful, old Indian tale became the basis of the lyrics for my song, Nightime Star. As I assembled the compositions for this album I was surprised to find that each one had a lyrical thread in common: Evening. All the songs are either about, set in or were written in the Evening of the day.

“Take the inventiveness of BOB DYLAN, the melodic voice of JOHN DENVER, add the showmanship of GARRISON KEILLOR and that’s MICHAEL JOHNATHON.”

Bob Spear - Publisher, HEARTLAND REVIEW

Bio

Michael Johnathon is a folksinger, songwriter, concert performer, author ... and now playwright ... who has a worldwide radio audience approaching a million listeners each week. He also created the world’s first multi-camera weekly series broadcast on the Internet.

This ‘Woody Guthrie in a Cyber World” grew up in upstate New York along the shores of the Hudson River. At 19 years old, he moved to the Mexican border town of Laredo, Texas and found a job working as a late night DJ on KLAR-FM. One night, he played Turn, Turn, Turn by the 60’s folkrock group The Byrds. As the song played, he recalled seeing Pete Seeger and Harry Chapin performing in his Dutchess County hometown in New York. By the time the song ended, he decided to pursue a career as a folksinger.

“While folksinging, delightful guitar picking, and environmental concerns have defined his professional life, this popular songwriter has embraced the modern age in a very unique way. His new Homestead album creates a warm James Taylor-like, homestyled musical storytelling."

Jonathan Widran - All Music Guide

Two months later, he bought a guitar and a banjo and settled into the isolated mountain hamlet of Mousie, Kentucky. For the next three years, he traveled up and down the hollers of the Appalachian mountains knocking on doors and learning the music of the mountain people. Michael experienced hundreds of front porch hootenannies throughout Appalachia where folks would pull out their banjos and fiddles, sit on their front porches with him and play the old songs that their grandparents taught them.

Soon enough, he began performing concerts at hundreds of colleges, schools and fairs. He performed two thousand Earth Concerts, plus benefits for the homeless, farm families, and shelters helping battered women and children. In all, he sang to over two million people in one four-year stretch. Billboard Magazine headlined him as an “UnSung Hero.” He has been featured on CNN, TNN, CMT, AP, Headline News, NPR, Bravo and the BBC.

Aside from touring, writing and recording he continues work on create new projects. A few years ago, Michael released his first book and CD gift set called WoodSongs. The book included the 16-song, all-acoustic WoodSongs compact disc. The musical highlight of the album is a duet of a mountain song titled New Wood that he performs with the legendary Odetta and an eight piece cello section. Other featured musicians on the CD include Grammy winning banjo master JD Crowe, Appalachian icon Jean Ritchie and others.

The success of the WoodSongs book and CD resulted in the creation of radio’s only syndicated live-audience program dedicated to brilliant but unknown artists. The show, called the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour, is recorded each week before a theatre audience and broadcast on over 460 stations from Australia to Boston to Ireland with well over one million listeners tuning in each week. The multi-media folk program is completely run by volunteers and available as a syndicated radio show plus online streaming, archiving, podcasting and now as a national TV series airing on PBS stations in 2006.

Michael's seventh album, HomeStead was released in 2004 with Sam Bush, Rob Ickes, Ronnie McCoury, Mike Cleveland, John Cowan and banjo master JD Crowe helping out. His live CD was released in 2005, recorded with friends like Sweet Honey In The Rock and others.

The new Evening Song album is an Americana, folk and bluegrass project filled with acoustic guitars, banjos, dobros and mandolins. Some songs are complimented by the rich classical texture of a real 22 piece orchestra section of violins, violas, cellos, and French horns. He calls the musical style Folkestral.

His latest project is the performance theatre script for "WALDEN: The Ballad of Thoreau". It is a two-act, one set, four character play about the final two days Henry David Thoreau spent in his cabin at Walden Pond. For information about the play and script samples visit www.WaldenPlay.com.

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