''Songs From the Gypsy'' is the sixth album by

Minneapolis Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origins ...

Celtic rock Celtic rock is a genre of folk rock, as well as a form of Celtic fusion which incorporates Celtic music, instrumentation and themes into a rock music context. It has been extremely prolific since the early 1970s and can be seen as a key foundat ...

band

Boiled in Lead Boiled in Lead is a rock/world-music band based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and founded in 1983. Tim Walters of ''MusicHound Folk'' called the group "the most important folk-rock band to appear since the 1970s." Influential record producer and mu ...

, and its second with lead singer/guitarist

Adam Stemple Adam Stemple is a Celtic-influenced American folk rock musician, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is also the author of several fantasy short stories and novels, including two series of novels co-written with his mother, writer Jane Yolen. Stem ...

. It is a song cycle based on a Hungarian folk tale, written largely by Stemple and his

Cats Laughing Cats Laughing is a folk rock band, founded in the late 1980s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and revived in 2015. Several of its members, including Emma Bull and best-selling author Steven Brust, are better known as writers of fantasy and science fict ...

bandmate

Steven Brust Steven Karl Zoltán Brust (born November 23, 1955) is an American fantasy and science fiction author of Hungarian descent. He is best known for his series of novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos, one of a disdained minority group of humans livi ...

several years prior to Boiled in Lead's recording. Brust, who is best known as a fantasy novelist, collaborated with writer

Megan Lindholm Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden (born March 5, 1952), known by her pen names Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm, is an American writer of speculative fiction. As Hobb, she is best known for her fantasy novels set in the ''Realm of the Elderlings'', w ...

on a novel, '' The Gypsy'', based on the songs. Boiled in Lead's album is considered the soundtrack to the novel. Brust had previously co-written two songs on Boiled in Lead's 1994 album ''

Antler Dance ''Antler Dance'' is the fourth album by Minneapolis Celtic rock band Boiled in Lead. It was the band's first recording with vocalist/guitarist Adam Stemple, who replaced Todd Menton after his departure in 1992. Founding bassist Drew Miller has ...

'', and had released a 1993 solo album, ''

A Rose for Iconoclastes ''A Rose for Iconoclastes'' is a folk album by drummer Steven Brust, an author of fantasy and science fiction novels and a member of the Minneapolis-based band Cats Laughing. It is Brust's only solo album, released in 1993. The album was produce ...

''. ''Songs From the Gypsy'' was released on CD in an enhanced multimedia format including both Boiled in Lead's music and the full text of Brust and Lindholm's novel, as well as 80 short sound clips of songs referenced in the novel's text. Musically, the album leaned more towards rock and blues than the worldbeat and folk Boiled in Lead had become known for. Bassist Drew Miller called the change in sound a temporary one related to the album's unusual genesis, since the songs had been written six years earlier, before Stemple had joined Boiled in Lead. "The ''Gypsy'' album "doesn't exactly represent us as we are now. It was a side project, actually. It's not indicative of the way the band is going," said Miller.

Critical reception

Critical reception to the album was mixed.

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...

reviewer Steven McDonald called ''Songs from The Gypsy'' "an example of Brust's serious songwriting working well", while Tim Walters of ''MusicHound Folk'' was critical, saying that while the band "performs admirably, Stemple'S writing isn't strong enough to pull off this song cycle." The ''Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music'' thought that the album confirmed Boiled in Lead's "willful lack of concern with commercial success" by moving away from the New Wave and folk influences heard on previous albums, which had attracted critical praise, in favor of a more acoustic sound. ''Green Man Review'' writer Robert M. Tilendis called the album "an absolute gem," praising its "strong narrative component." National Public Radio's Anne Williams was positive, saying that the album "maintains Boiled in Lead as one of the most innovative world beat bands today." A critical review by AllMusic's Roch Parisien praised Brust's "engrossingly poetic, impressionist story" but called the album's technical aspect "a failure of multimedia integration," in that the novel's 17 chapters were presented as "scrollable text only, which also intersperse some 80 song lyric excerpts that you can play from hot buttons. Annoyingly, you must flip back to a main menu index to move from one chapter to the next." The review, written in 1995, predated a wave of popular

e-book reader An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals. Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-read ...

s that began to emerge about ten years later.

Track listing

References

{{Authority control 1995 albums Boiled in Lead albums Works by Steven Brust