LELAND AND THE SILVER WELLS – LELAND AND THE SILVER WELLS

On her album Leland and the Silver Wells, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Leland Ettinger creates songs that are expansive yet intimate, offering artfully layered arrangments that transport the listener while driving home the vividly personal lyrics of such intoxicating tunes as “We Dissolve,” “Was a Prisoner,” “Give Up the Gun,” “Lost My Way” and the epic, Joan Didion-inspired “Play It As It Lays” (Didion’s namesake novel also inspired the “Silver Wells” moniker). The album’s lovingly textured arrangements incorporate strings, brass and woodwinds along with conventional rock instrumentation to create a stirring musical statement that abounds with warmth and humanity. Leland and the Silver Well is the artist’s third album, and her first in over a decade. While her two previous efforts-2004’s Forever and 2007’s The Golden West, both released under the name Leland-won Ettinger a fair amount of attention, she’s also kept busy in her parallel career as a photographer, in which she explores the visual aspect of the same iconoclastic vision that drives her music. “I wanted to make a true album that feels like an emotional journey and a singular entity, even though everybody tells me that people don’t perceive music this way anymore,” the artist says of Leland and the Silver Wells. “I think that there are still people who want the traditional emotional journey of an album. It’s like a novel, and the songs are the chapters that inform each other and give depth to one another.