CROW AND GAZELLE RELEASE HEART-WRENCHING VIDEO FOR "TAKE IT AWAY"
Texas-based duo Crow and Gazelle, the musical partnership of Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductee Mike McClure and his partner in life and in music, artist Chrislyn Lawrence, released the video for “Take It Away.” The song is the lead single from their debut LP, As Above Now So Below, due out April 26th. Of the video, Lawrence says:
The narrative for this video came from a very personal place. As a child I didn’t decide for myself that I was ‘unworthy’ and I didn’t make-believe scenes of death and overwhelming pain - in my world those messages and experiences came heavy and early and they were real. We all have childhood wounds. Whether it’s our own tragic experiences and losses, or someone else’s childhood trauma (a teacher or parent) that’s unhealed and spills over on us, we have them and they inform “who and what” we are.
My parents each carry something very deep and painful that happened when they were young. Thankfully, I know that now and have done the work to see how some things that happened in my life were trauma based responses, not done of or by free will. Most of the trauma I’ve carried has been transformed and released through mindful work, and lately a lot of that healing has happened in the presence of my parent’s healing their own wounds. Which has been an amazing gift.
The day before we filmed the opening scenes of this video, my mom shared details of something I had never known before that happened when I was four… it was very painful to hear, and brought back a flood of memories and feelings for us both. But it was also a revelation. And in that sense, it set us free because it was brought to the surface, into the light, where it could alchemize and be transformed.
Trauma not transformed is transferred. Our hope is that this video, in some small way, moves someone else to lean into their own childhood wounds and to let that little one’s hurt be seen and heard. And that once it’s honored, hopefully it can be transformed and released.
STREAM: “TAKE IT AWAY”
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 in 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, of 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.
