Search - Jim Lampos :: Cosmogram

Cosmogram, the fifth CD from acclaimed songwriter Jim Lampos, is a guide to roads less traveled and paths from another era. It is an intensely personal, introspective, direct set of songs, with a subtle political theme centered on the betrayal of the American ideal. These songs contain a map, describing the terrain they live on. There is a physical space that they move through, often quite literally. Most of the songs move along the Post Road, which was marked by Benjamin Franklin, who personally laid milestones along its rout to help the Post Riders gauge the distances between towns. Taking a measure by Franklin's standard is a philosophical touchstone, to be relished in these politically turbulent days. Today, the Post Road runs past scrapyards and bucolic town greens, graveyards, schools, churches and jails down through New England, into New York, where it passes directly in front of Ground Zero. Cosmogram is about dualities: light and shadow, honor and ruthlessness, truth and lies, love and bitterness. It tells of the cycle of seasons and the natural world, and also acknowledges the gritty surreality of manufactured, industrial realities. These songs see the flower struggling up through the cracks in the sidewalk, and the homeless person dying within reach of it. Not pretty, but real. Ultimately, Cosmogram is about topography, about finding "the lay of the land" in both a physical and spiritual sense. It's about knowing where the solid, high ground is before the deluge hits.