Who are Crow and Gazelle? Well, we can share this about the Texas-based duo: Crow and Gazelle is Oklahoma Red Dirt pioneer Mike McClure and multidisciplinary artist Chrislyn Lawrence. McClure is a founding member of The Great Divide and an Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductee, and is also a widely respected producer whose work has helped shape artists including Cross Canadian Ragweed, Turnpike Troubadours, and Kaitlin Butts. Lawrence brings an equally vital perspective as a poet, filmmaker, community organiser, and trauma-informed healer. What is the one thing we can’t tell you? Which one is Crow and which one is Gazelle. We could make a guess, but it would be informed by so many prejudging preconceptions and conform to a narrow set of societal norms and assumptions. So, like Meatloaf, we won’t do that.
Fall How It Will is a pivotal song in the duo’s new album Truth Be Told, which is out on May 15th. The album is a connected narrative which tells the story of a woman and a man navigating a collapsing world, reckoning with inherited harm, confronting patriarchal control, and searching for a more liberated way to live and love. Told from a female perspective, Fall How It Will tells of a struggle between accepting boundaries of love and taking risks with one’s heart as opposed to conforming to a rigidly imposed definition of what is acceptable within a narrowing confine of religious strictures, with an origin myth of original sin carried forever down countless generations.
“We live in a world shaped by shame that was never truly ours to carry,” Lawrence explains. “When you’re taught to believe you are inherently unworthy, that love only counts if it looks a certain way, it creates fear and separation. But love, real love, draws us back to the truth. It reminds us there was never anything wrong with us to begin with.”
