Bone Orchard Offers a Unique Taos Sound

By Carol Mell, 11-27-07

	Caption: Husband and wife, Daniel Pretends Eagle and Carol Morgan-Eagle combine their songwriting and vocal talents for their "psychedelic underground with a bluegrass vibe" band called "Bone Orchard." They'll be playing at the Mine Shaft Tavern in Madrid, NM on Nov. 30 with the Santa Fe All Stars.

It’s an old Taos story. Artists come to town to bask in the light, the land and the history but this is the version with a musical twist. It concerns Daniel Pretends Eagle and his band, “Bone Orchard.” His other half, Carol Morgan-Eagle, not only performs vocals with the band; she’s the organizer, stylist and taskmaster in their lives and on their newest CD, “A Romance of Ghosts.”

Dan is a thoughtful, learned and still-looking-for-answers kind of man who works out his questions on the guitar, banjo, percussion and most of all in his songwriting. He is an imposing but not menacing 6 foot 2.

“My father was Lakota Sioux, raised in a boarding school,” Dan said. “He had a lot of issues and left when I was a baby. They say I’m not that tall for a Pretends Eagle. We were tall and good horsemen.”

That’s the kind of story with which Pretends Eagle had to settle while his Anglo mother raised him in an Illinois suburb.

His musical influences were underground dissonant rock and roll bands like “Velvet Underground” and “Joy Division.” He started his first band in seventh grade.

“I made ditties as soon as I put words together. As a songwriter my influences are the literary and cinematic expression of the Western environment. My style is Cinematic Western Gothic.”

That means using music to create a visual landscape, he explained, with an atmosphere that is Gothic, in a literary sense. Think Edgar Allan Poe. As for movies, he went for the gritty Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, known for their action and violence, so much so that the punky roots rock and roll band he had in Los Angeles was named “The Peckinpahs.”

Carol is always as sleek and stylish as her Los Angeles fashion background. Her father took her to visit ghost towns and told stories about gunfighters. She grew up admiring Emmy Lou Harris and John Denver and wanted to perform in Broadway musicals. As a teenager she dove into the underground music scene, discovered Dan’s band and later, Dan.

“Dan’s songs were the ones I felt I could have written,” she said. “They answered every aesthetic I wanted in music. I mentioned to him that his music reminded me of the (Richard Brautigan) novel, ‘The Hawkline Monster.’ We couldn’t stop talking after that.”

With a taste for the land, they would visit Yosemite. One day it was so hot and steamy, they sat in stalled traffic and decided to move to Taos.

“There was more history immediately available,” Dan mused. “New Mexico has ghost tales and outlaws and it provided material that hadn’t been worked to death.”

They have been blending their urban sound with New Mexico’s history, landscape and mythology ever since 1999 in what Dan called a psychedelic underground sound with a bluegrass vibe

He was a lit major; she was into philosophy. Carol said at home if they are not playing their own music they live in the silence and they read—a lot—something that is evident after a few minutes talking with them.

In “A Romance of Ghosts” I can hear Carol’s ghost towns, Dan’s Wild West mythologies, (Dan’s great uncle was a Sioux wrestler in the Buffalo Bill Wild West show), the yearning for open space combined with the influence of philosophy, Zen swordsmanship, Appalachian ballads and Celtic harmonies, (Carol earned a shed full of trophies and medals for Scottish Highland Dancing.)

If titles like “Whiskey Flats,” “Missouri Raider,” “Snake Oil Salesman” and “Dancing with the Ghost of William Bonney” make you think of country western, they’re not. Instead, these are bittersweet songs of melancholy, poignancy and pining for the idea of the West, the Sioux father he never knew and the ghost town loving father she lost in an atmosphere of leather, bullets, liquor and far away spaces.

If that blend sounds impossible, it isn’t, it’s personal, and a marriage that works in life and in music. “Bone Orchard” is a sound all their own, blending all their influences to come out with something that plays well in the Southwest and now increasingly in Europe. Dan, Carol and some fine New Mexico instrumentalists present darn good picking without all that sheepish grinning.

“People’s idea of country music has changed,” said Dan. “We’re Americana. I once saw a review of Peckinpah’s movies saying that the landscape is a character. It’s like painting, if a song is a musical landscape, we put as much attention to background as foreground, because landscape is important to us.”

As for the occasional murder, Dan said, “There has to be a catharsis. I don’t want to bring ugly and discouraging things into the world.”

Catharsis? Not a Country Western word but in Taos, it fits.

Look up and listen to “Bone Orchard” selections at www.boneorchardmusic.com and at their www.myspace.com/boneorchard3.