As one of the best loved musicians in folk music, Lucy Kaplansky is a top-tier songwriter and highly acclaimed performer whose 7th album on Red House Records, Reunion is an eloquent masterpiece. Mixing vibrant melodies with Americana/folk rhythms, the record explores family history and where we come from with pop and country-tinged hooks that have come to define Lucy s timeless sound.
The title song Reunion celebrates Lucy s pioneering immigrant grandmother and her journey from Poland to Toronto, where the matriarch and business woman founded the Health Bread Bakery chain in the early 20th century. Depicted on the album cover in a painting by noted political cartoonist Avrom Yanovsky (one of the original bakery workers and father to Lovin Spoonful s Zal Yanovsky), the bakery was the center of the Kaplansky family s life.
Like the title track, each song on Reunion tells its own unique story. Lucy and co-writer Richard Litvin connect us to our common humanity through songs of family, origins, loss and discovery--from watching parents pass on (I ll See You Again and Sleep Well), to witnessing a daughter blossom (Mother s Day), to chronicling the journey of an abandoned child refugee (the radio-friendly Scavenger). These poignant originals are woven with unique covers of Eliza Gilkyson, Woody Guthrie, Amy Correia and The Beatles. Together these tracks create a tapestry that is at turns deeply moving, joyful, meditative and rollicking, Reunion is the album that fans have been waiting for.