The Mike McClure Duo
$25 Advance/ $30 Day of Show
Indoor show; limited seating. No reserved tables available
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Crow and Gazelle
“This project is all about seizing the moment to become more alive and to honor what is evolving within us—to use our voices in harmony to impart healing and to offer love out into a world which is so torn apart. That is why and how this all started.”
Crow and Gazelle, the name and banner for the musical partnership of Mike McClure and Chrislyn Lawrence, is a hymnodic, moving collaboration borne out of the connection between two people healing, loving, and growing together. Their songs—built around their entangled close harmonies and sparse, reverent acoustic instrumentation—are wrought out of the love they have come to find for themselves and for each other. Their debut outing, As Above Now So Below, which will be released on April 26, 2024, is an album centered on acceptance and growth in the face of pain… and on embracing the sacred nature within each and every one of us.
“I was out there drifting through the twilight,
Out there in that ether afterglow.
Then you came and hit me like a spotlight,
Shined it on the dark night of my soul.
…
How lovely not to lie,
Not to run, not to hide,
To be seen and to be held
and still be free, free to fly.”
- from “Free to Fly”
Though As Above Now So Below is their first official release as Crow and Gazelle, Mike and Chrislyn’s musical (and personal) histories go back decades. They first met at a concert near Fort Worth, TX back in 2003, experiencing “an instant ancient connection, at the cellular level” from the first time they talked. Mike had made his name as one of the progenitors of the Oklahoma Red Dirt Country scene, producing early records for Turnpike Troubadours, Kaitlin Butts, Jason Boland, and Cross Canadian Ragweed. Because of this, he was a staple of the music scene touring around the region at that time. Chrislyn, who historically has lived as an artist in behind-the-scenes support roles, was even at one point Mike’s booking agent. Though circumstances kept them from pursuing their initial connection, they drifted in and out of each other’s lives over the years as friends. But, as fate would have it, they crossed paths by chance in 2018 and “that was that.”
“I never really allowed myself to take the spotlight before. Maybe the shadows felt more safe. Any desire to be more, I kept hidden and let fear or others’ needs suffocate. So for decades, I stayed in the background, projecting light on others. Videography, photography, music management, grant writing… then I finally transformed my own trauma into purpose, and started letting myself and my story be seen and heard a bit more; I helped facilitate healing for others through writing workshops in jails, activist, and advocacy work for marginalized communities and became a yoga teacher. What happened when Mike and I got together was pure and expansive, our love gave me more courage to be seen and heard in a much bigger way, and I started performing in public. That connection brought deeper desires and more purpose to the surface, for us both. What our voices do together is uncanny—it’s truly of a higher frequency. I am able to see and embrace the light more now.”
The name Crow and Gazelle came serendipitously, almost out of the air. In the early days of dating, Mike had come to visit Chrislyn in Austin. She had a deck of tarot cards, and while waiting for him to arrive had drawn one card for each of them—one crow, one gazelle. They left those cards out where they could see them all weekend, and the name just stuck in their minds over time… it just fit.
“I’ve always been fascinated by crows and have at least five songs with crows in the lyrics. I’m like a crow in my nature, where I fly around in circles when I’m working on something—lazy rounding circles. Chrislyn is like the gazelle in every way—straight line, fast, certain. I picture her running in a full sprint as I’m making lazy circles in the sky around her.”
The album takes its name from a well known axiom in an ancient Greek Hermetic text: “As above, so below; as below, so above.” The message of that expression is simple—the distance between the divine and the human is shorter than we think. And, for Crow and Gazelle, it means that “if we transform our traumas, if we take responsibility for our own healing, we can reclaim our connection to the divine and to all of life, and that alchemy can bring heaven to earth and earth to heaven."
“Our mission is to deconstruct the idea of separateness… we are not separate from divinity, nor are we cast out of “heaven” for being human. We are all anointed. We are all holy. We are everything, and we are infinite.”
Both Mike and Chrislyn were raised in small conservative towns, where religion was foundational. But for them, the messages of original sin, and the lack of women's voices—let alone power—never quite felt right. The ongoing deconstruction of those messages, of spirituality and of truth, has inspired many of their songs together. While the record is steeped in traditionally religious imagery, honoring the musical ancestry that informs the duo’s sound, the themes of As Above Now So Below take that language and tease it away— towards a kind of openness that looks within, rather than without, for purpose and meaning. In its raw vulnerability, the record approaches letting go (of control, of dangerous and unhelpful dogmas, and fear of the unknown) as the path to redemption and liberation.
“I am letting go
Of whatever it is that does not serve my soul.
I am letting go
As above, now so below.”
- from “As Above Now So Below”
The album was recorded in February of 2023 in Pawnee, Oklahoma. The studio had belonged to Mike’s longtime friend Steve Ripley, the founder and lead singer of legendary band The Tractors. Ripley, in addition to recording and touring with Bob Dylan, JJ Cale, and many others, had owned the inimitable Leon Russell’s The Church studio in Tulsa for years before building his own place on his family’s land in Pawnee. Though Steve passed away in 2019, his wife Charlene still keeps the studio operational for a select group of close friends. This was the perfect place for Crow and Gazelle to take their songs.
Almost all of the songs were recorded live in minimal takes, with no click track or workarounds. They were relying on the spirit of the room in the sessions to guide them. Not only were they able to record on Ripley’s vintage gear, microphones, and recording channels, but there was a sense that Steve’s spirit was present with them as they worked—enough so that he felt like a collaborator on an instrumental song Chrislyn wrote in the studio, “You Belong”. In Mike’s words, “I felt Steve’s presence everywhere, and so did Chrislyn. I was watching it happen before my eyes.”
“Yes, Steve Ripley’s spirit helped me write “You Belong”, on the very first morning we were in the studio… which allowed us to make this record. I was stripped of my fear and imposter syndrome on day one and was then able to just be. For me, there’s no other place we could have done this.”
Through its joyful, reflective, and sometimes-sorrowful thirteen songs, As Above Now So Below walks alongside the listener… through the depths of darkness, but ever holding space to see that through it is the only way to the other side. As from “Blackbird”, Crow and Gazelle remind us, “I will walk beside you, you don’t have to be alone.” This harrowingly beautiful and raw debut outing is at its heart the narration of a divine love story—not only the one between two people, but between our hearts and our minds, our pasts and our futures, our knowns and our unknowns. It’s an offering to the shared possibility of love that vibrates through each and every one of us.
"Our coming together has created a whole new path for us both. And our live shows just keep getting better and more powerful. It’s more than just two people in a band, and it’s so much deeper than just us. We gather around one microphone, while our spirits and voices envelop each other, and the audience—it's the very essence of interconnected harmony. I think our music and our shows are a reflection of the human potential - to allow our full range of emotions, flowing from grief to joy, held by another’s understanding. It's part of some bigger cosmic contract. So we're doing everything we can to honor it."
