The picture to the left is the front cover of the album. It was taken at the rear of a barn near Olema in Marin County.
John Stewart's California Bloodlines album is a classic of country / folk / pop. This is the only site on the internet which looks at this album in detail - both in the recording / composition details and my own personal interpretation of it.
The theme of the album is the past, it's remembrance and it's relation to the present. These are seen from both a public and a personal angle. Publically: songs preserve the past and show people of the present how things can be better. It also links the singer with the bloodlines community of his past and universal images of nature (expanding from the merely individual and national). The personal and elemental nature of the theme is reflected not only in subject but in the recording process itself (hardly any dubbing, first takes). Personally - There is a need to find the self through both personal and ancestral past. The connecting thread of bloodlines connects past and present.
E-mail me at: simonbrewer@postmaster.co.uk if you have any comments, ideas, info.....