Tornado Sky - Beautiful Now (Blue Melody Records)

Jerry Careaga is living proof that creativity is not something to be dipped in and out of. Art is not a career; it is a vocation, a calling. That even when you think that you are finished with music, that doesn’t mean that music is finished with you. Having written numerous soft-rock classics for the likes of Bellamy Brothers, Michael Martin Murphy and others over a long and illustrious career, he recently headed into retirement. But retirement didn’t suit him, and the muse soon came calling for him. And so he returned to the musical fray, writing and performing with his wife, Stephanie Gladhart, as Tornado Sky.

“Beautiful Now” is a song that, for obvious reasons, echoes the sound of the seventies, more specifically, that Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter era as it spilt out of the Californian clubs and bars, merged with rock, and went national….and then global. It is anything but a pastiche or a plundering of past glories, but it certainly tips its hat towards that scene.

But it also builds a bridge with the here and now, not least because of its theme of playing the long game, living in the moment, and appreciating where you are in life and love. Everything moves on and does so quickly. Make sure you stop and smell the roses. Life might not be perfect, but beauty rarely is.

And so over a gorgeous weave of acoustic delicacy and drifting electric sonics, driving beats and their twin harmonies spiralling around each other, “Beautiful Now” is a celebration of life, real life, honest, authentic, everyday life, the serenity and the chaos, the highs and lows, and more important than anything else, having someone to share it with. Isn’t that the only life that matters?

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