Kris Delmhorst’s fourth studio release, Strange Conversation (Signature Sounds, June 2006), is a vital and celebratory meditation on art and its ability to speak across time and distance. After several albums of genre-bending original work, Delmhorst found inspiration in the work of various well-known poets. Some of the poems are set verbatim to music, some dismantled and reassembled in significantly new renditions, others merely used as the jumping-off point for Delmhorst’s own literate lyrical take. The fact that the album feels modern, cohesive, and joyful is testament both to the inherent timelessness of the poems and to the skillful adaptations that bring them to life as songs – not to mention Delmhorst’s wine-deep, honey-bright voice, which can deliver even a centuries-old phrase directly to the doorstep of the listener’s soul.