Ringdown debuts at Big Ears Festival: I wonder, do you wonder?

“If you want more / Just open the door / I’ll leave it open for you / Take my key, make a copy for you / I’ll leave it open, leave it open for you.”

You know, there are love songs, and then there are love songs. And Ringdown, the compelling partnership of Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee, who will make their debut at the Big Ears Festival on March 22 at the Old City Performing Arts Center, 111 State St., Knoxville, at 4:15 p.m., go right to the heart of love. It’s a trip everyone should enjoy at least once in this all too brief life we share.

Danni Lee and Caroline Shaw are two of the most grounded, powerful, and enriching voices you’ll ever hear, individually or joined. And in Ringdown, they are joined in an ego-erasing, ego-highlighting, ego-blessing union that resembles the profile of Mt. Hood, the looming essence of their home base, Portland, Oregon.

Say what you will about Portland, which is maligned these days for its battles with Antifa mobs, drug addicts, and defund-the-police short-sightedness, but Mt. Hood is immutable.

When I lived in Portland 13 years ago, I waited for several months to see Mt. Hood, frustrated by smog and weather, and then out of the late winter fogginess, suddenly, spectacularly, there it was. In my long life, there are few revelations that compare to that first encounter with Mt. Hood’s majesty. There really aren’t words to convey the power of seeing the mountain in the clear, late afternoon light from Portland.

Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee mirror the converging profiles of Mt. Hood’s slopes. They meet at a point which is the definition of poetry.

Caroline Shaw is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. That’s enough to stop you in your tracks, even if you have no idea what a Pulitzer Prize means, which is most of us. It’s a recognition of an artist’s contribution to the world’s understanding of itself.

Caroline, who displays a sparkling individuality as a singer, violinist, and composer, won the 2013 Pulitzer for Music for her a cappella piece “Partita for 8 Voices.” And in 2022, she won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for “Narrow Sea.” I first encountered her at Big Ears two years ago when she performed with SŌ Percussion at the Tennessee Theater. And last year, she was one of five composers who created “The Blue Hour,” an utterly unique song cycle on death and dying, which was performed by Shara Nova and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.

Shaw’s body of work includes nearly 20 vocal compositions, instrumental pieces for soloists on piano, cello, and shakuhachi, more than a dozen compositions for chamber ensembles, a half dozen orchestral works, and forays in film, television, and multimedia.

Danni Lee is a singer-songwriter, but that label tells less than half the story. She is faithful to a very simple principle espoused by Stanford professor Mark Applebaum, that real musicians should never lose touch with the childlike wonder of “playing” their instrument of choice. As a result, Danni breaks all the rules, inventing new possibilities with every performance. But this playfulness is matched with an emotional depth and seriousness in her writing that produces songs of extraordinary power. And then ... her voice is unmatched. Except by Caroline Shaw’s voice.

Together, they have delved into what they call electronic cinematic pop. Where better to debut Ringdown than the Big Ears Festival?

When I spoke to Caroline and Danni on Tuesday, I had only been able to listen to three cuts from their forthcoming new album, one of which was a cover of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” By sheer coincidence, Tuesday was the 61st anniversary of Patsy Cline’s tragic death in a plane crash. Where Patsy’s lament is laced with regret over wasted time and self doubt, the Ringdown “Crazy” reverberates in a way you can’t shrug off. You can’t just walk away from it. It followed me around all day.

In “Reckoning,” a love song that takes your breath away, a voice that is shedding a solitary past sings “I met you / the first day of Spring / From your mouth / creative reckoning.” As the song builds, it asks a question that distinguishes the creative reckoning of Danni Lee and Caroline Shaw’s songs from anything else in the realm of pop music.

“What if you had never let me in?”

Ringdown comes to Big Ears with perfect timing, on the first day of Spring.

John Job is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Ringdown debuts at Big Ears Festival: I wonder, do you wonder?