Jim-n-Lisa - Before Dreaming

Hear The Track Here

Just before I get started let me send a message to Jim Miller. You can only ever get ONE Stevie ya know. It's a once in a lifetime event, you can't win it twice so **** off out of it!! :D Seriously, JimBob Charliething and I are old friends by now and I can throw gratutious insults around like confetti and not have a care in the world about repercussions (Ed: It helps that Jim's in Texas and you are in the UK, Gilmore). If such a thing WERE possible, then Jim-n-Lisa might very well win more than their fair share and that is one of the reasons I decided to keep it to a once and only thing. (Travel Ed: You ever heard of airplanes? Be scared, Gilmore, quake in thy boots)

Jim-n-Lisa have already scored a string of Must Haves this year: Rasta Man (September 2006), Missing Douglas (August 2006), Lovely Walkers (June 2006) and a Highly Recommended for Jihad (April 2006) proving (to me anyway) just how right they were for the Artist Of The Year 2004 award I gave them. While you may have noticed my huge bias towards these Texans, their music and style can win over the most hardened of hearts and amply backs up any praise I - or other reviewers - festoon them with. What makes Before Dreaming an extra special experience is the dulcet voice of Madam Lisa herself, a thing of beauty we don't hear anywhere near enough of.

What we do hear enough of is the incredible musical touch of young Jim me lad. Believe me when I say this, I try REAL hard to be more critical with artists of this calibre, simply because I expect an excellence that few artists around can sustain for long. Let alone over years, in Jim-n-Lisa's case. That same excellence has been shown time after time by this husband and wife team, and nowhere so evident are they a team as on this wonderfully relaxed, warm massage of a track. With it's jazzy interludes, stylish performances from both vocalists, a really exceptional vocal arrangement and some lovely acoustic playing from Mr Miller, Beyond Dreaming is exactly what I would have expected from them. And then about another light year or two beyond that. Seriously, I am stunned at how complex, classy and worldly weary this track is, all at the same time. Not to be satisfied with the merely impossibly brilliant and as if all that wasn't enough digital stimulation to arouse a nunnery, it lasts for an orgasmic seven minutes and oh....oh...

Beautiful. Gorgeous. I Love You, have my babies....

(Ed: they took him away, babbling. He said to tell you get this MUST HAVE track or he'll be back!)