Alive and Breathing

Rounding into home with this series, some familiar characters and universal themes help spin Allison Crowe’s “16 Songs” Video Album full-circle.

Reimagining more than a century of cinema, decades of songwriting, and a dozen albums of genre-spanning musicality, Allison’s fusion of music + movie invention carries us up, up, and away.

She dreams in Technicolor for this capping episode of an animated mission accomplished by the Fleischer Studios team in 1941 - “Superman: The Mechanical Monsters”.

Emblematic of the intertwined DNA of inspiration - Superman’s creators, child-hood pals Joe Shuster (1914 – 1992), illustrator born in Toronto, Canada, and Jerry Siegel (1914 – 1996), Cleveland, Ohio, USA-born writer, were big film buffs, too.

Metropolis, the city of Clark Kent, Lois Lane and The Daily Planet, gets its name from the 1927 German expressionist science-fiction epic – a movie masterwork of Fritz Lang (1890 – 1976). Superman’s alter-ego is a nomenclatural mashup of American film actors Clark Gable and Kent Taylor.

In art, as in all areas of life, self-determination and expression – freedom - is elemental.

“Alive and Breathing” - Allison Crowe (vocals, guitar, piano, engineer and producer) is joined here by Dave Baird (bass) and Laurent Boucher (percussion).