Desert Muse      ...New Mexico Magazine/Feb. 05

Who:   Paula Tripodi

CD:     Listen to the Wind

Genre:  Contemporary folk, acoustic

In Listen to the Wind, Paula Tripodi delivers a poetic and engaging solo album of her own compositions, most written during the past seven years while she’s lived in the area near El Morro National Monument along N.M. 53, know as the Ancient Way.

Her warm voice buoyantly floats over the gentle strumming of her acoustic guitar.  It’s the kind of fare you’d expect to hear in a relaxing coffeehouse.  Listeners can kick back and enjoy her melodic voice and reflective lyrics.

She’s performed for about 24 years and has assembled some of her best compositions for the recording.  “New Mexico has been really inspiring for me,” she says.  Many songs reflect her rural life here, where she and her husband, Rocco, haul their own water and use solar and wind energy.

In  Listen to the Wind, she addresses those daily blues that can be shaken, if we just take time to reflect about the beautiful sights and sounds of nature. How true that is in New Mexico.  We’ve all experienced that melancholy mood that’s broken by just getting out into a wonderful blue-sky day or golden moonlit night.

“Rain in the Desert” offers a more lively, highway cruisin’, bluesy kind of ditty.  She sings, “I don’t know where I’m goin’, but I know I’m goin’ there alone.”

Her catchy song, “Peanut Butter,” captures the challenge of sharing confidences.  She laments, “If I tell you my secret, would you spread it around? We both live in a very small town, everything that is said gets around.”

Jeremy Mayne of Cross-String Productions, in Albuquerque, recorded the CD giving it a clear, clean-focused sound that captures Tripodi’s straight-from-the-heart lyrics.

               - -Emily Drabanski

                   Managing Editor of New Mexico Magazine

                   February 2005 issue