Gillian Grogan hits us with a slow-burning portrait on “Silver Lake.” The song begins quietly and slowly, building to a melodic and sweet storytelling pace by minute two. A lightly tapped hi-hat train-style beat keeps the rhythmic aspect building while a few guitar layers dance around each other under Grogan’s informal vocal style. It blooms into an all-out folk pop instrumental and back down to finish out the tale in the end. For a singer-songwriter, it’s a long tune, but well worth it for the completion of the story.
“Silver Lake” is an epic. A classic. It’s the soundtrack to one of my earlier outdoor adventures, a widening window onto the story of a group of friends, who didn’t know what they were doing in the slightest, but who went for it nonetheless. A tale of less-than-ideal circumstances and magic nonetheless, of crooked histories and final hurrahs, of big mistakes and petite victories, of laughing in the face of it all. But most of all, I wanted to make sure people could feel what I felt, as I crouched on that rock with Silver Lake wrapped in autumn color, below, just beyond my socks and sandals. “Pitch a sail and we’ll fly away, off this mountain into the lake”. We did normal things, but our adventurous spirits made them feel wild,” says Grogan.
