MIKE McCLURE & CHRISLYN LAWRENCE ARE CROW AND GAZELLE IN THEIR LATEST "TAKE IT AWAY"
Today, Texas-based duo Crow and Gazelle released “Take It Away,” the lead single from their debut LP, As Above Now So Below, due out April 26th. “It’s beautiful, and poignant…‘Take It Away' is a plea to not give up in the face of what seems like overwhelming odds,” said Twangville in their premiere. “Take just one more breath, do just one more thing, and that’s the first step to healing. It features both Lawrence and McClure leading the vocals, but also harmonizing throughout.”
“Sometimes, when you’re at an impasse or someone you love is in the midst of tragedy, there are no viable words to ease the pain,” the band explains. “Sometimes, the only thing we can do is encourage some kind of release, even if for just a moment - letting go of tension, however slowly, may be the only real remedy. The pain won’t magically disappear, but if you can let go enough to breathe, then you can find a way through what feels impossible.”
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 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, 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. And, for Crow and Gazelle, it means that “if we transform our traumas, if we take responsibility for our own healing, we can reclaim our connection to the divine and to all of life, and that alchemy can bring heaven to earth and earth to heaven.”
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.
McClure and Lawrence first met at a concert near Fort Worth, TX in 2003, experiencing “an instant ancient connection, at the cellular level” from the first time they talked. McClure had made his name as one of the progenitors of the Oklahoma Red Dirt Country scene, producing early records for Turnpike Troubadours, Kaitlin Butts, Jason Boland, and Cross Canadian Ragweed. Lawrence, who historically has lived as an artist in behind-the-scenes support roles, was even at one point McClure’s booking agent. Though circumstances kept them from pursuing their initial connection, they drifted in and out of each other’s lives over the years as friends. But, as fate would have it, they crossed paths by chance in 2018, and “that was that.”
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.
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