THE PRAIRIE SUITE

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COMING THIS AUTUMN

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THE PRAIRIE SUITE ● COMING THIS AUTUMN ● 

THE PRAIRIE SUITE

In the 1840s, thousands of men, women and children set out into the unknown, heading across the vast American Prairies looking for a better life in the West. The Prairie Suite is inspired by their stoicism and the scale and outstanding beauty of the landscape they travelled through on their epic journey.

A dirt road winding through a golden field with a small red barn, mountains in the background, and a clear blue sky.

I’ve always dabbled with writing classical pieces, not only the pop & soul I wrote for Cado Belle when starting my career. Once something had begun to emerge in my head, usually the result of idle tinkering on the keyboard, I’d make a rough recording onto cassette, later DAT tapes. Luckily for me I was obsessive about it. Forty years later I started going through all those boxes of stuff you accumulate through life and there they were, including the tapes I’d recorded at the time of my trips across the USA.

Scenic landscape featuring a serene lake in the foreground, green grassy areas, and rolling hills leading up to red rock formations and mountains in the distance under a partly cloudy blue sky.
Line drawing of mountain range with peaks and slopes on black background

In the early 1980’s I was on Interstate 191 travelling East from Salt Lake City, Utah when the idea for the Prairie Suite first entered my mind. Exiting at Vernal and turning up a dusty unmade road that led maybe twenty miles into the high desert, I’d gone to visit some dinosaur tracks discovered on a stretch of the Mormon Trail back in the mid 1800’s. This was the time when the USA opened itself to the hungry hordes who had migrated from Europe for a better life. We’ve all seen the movies, the wagon trains, the epic landscapes, the heroic vistas: The lived experience is far more profound. The dinosaur tracks quickly dimmed, but the idea of those rugged pioneers affected me deeply.

An older man with glasses sitting on a gray sofa, with a grand piano and a guitar in the background.
White line drawing of mountain peaks on a black background.

By the time I reached Chimney Rock Nebraska, a totemic way-point marking the three main wagon trails West and a three day drive away for me, the thematic core was beginning to crystalise. I was working for many different bands in the eighties, Abba, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, though it was the protean punk-rock band The Stranglers at the time. Their talents as musicians are more qualitative than that narrow pigeon-hole adjective would have you believe. An influence certainly, but it’s really the Romantic composers, Vaughan Williams, Dvorak, Delius that really resonate with me. We never know where inspiration takes us, we can only be travellers, observing and recording what moves us as we pass through. For the Prairie Suite I went back to those original rough first takes I’d recorded. I had visited them occasionally over time, re-written and recorded new evolved versions, but that later work had been incoherent, spotted, random. The originals are the source for what you hear now.

Painting of a woman in period clothing, walking through a field with sheep, under a blue sky with clouds, with the text "The Prairie Suite" and the artist's name, Duncan Stuart Mackillop, below.
Line art illustration of mountain peaks and slopes against a black background. 
THE PRAIRIE SUITE

Available on CD and download this Autumn.

The Winter Has Broken. 4.35
Independence Missouri 4.57
Across the Prairie Sky. 6.09
The Glimmering. 5.48
The Last Fight of the Snowgoose. 3.45
Herne the Hunter. 6.41
Cedar Mountain. 6.25

A painting of a woman in a pink dress and bonnet riding a white horse through a grassy field, with other women and children walking behind her. The sky is partly cloudy.