“Waterfall Laughter” Finds Romance In The Soil Beneath Our Feet
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Waterfall Laughter (La Tierra Ríe en Cascadas)
, that tactile quality expands into something communal: a cool Latin folk groove gradually gathering warmth, colour and bodies around it. Chapter two of Fais Toi Plaisir, the track begins with an easy, earthbound sway before opening into a celebration where bilingual folk, Latin rhythms and mountain air seem to occupy the same stretch of ground.
The project’s unusual construction is central to that character. Founded by luthier, producer and Berklee graduate Martin Maudal, Baldy Crawlers grew from a showcase for handmade guitars into a rotating collective of players. Maudal builds the instruments himself, bringing an unusually direct relationship between craft and performance to the recordings. There is something fitting about music this attentive to the natural world being played on instruments whose construction remains so close to the person making it.
Norrell Thompson’s lead vocal provides the song’s centre, moving between English and Spanish with an unforced fluidity. The shift doesn’t feel ornamental; the second language seems to give the melody another way to move. Thompson’s delivery settles naturally into the arrangement, while Jonathan Montes’ piano adds brightness around the edges. Marc Weller’s pedal steel introduces a lingering ache, Ross Schodek’s bass supplies an elastic low-end movement, and the percussion keeps everything gently in motion. Rather than announcing its destination, the arrangement accumulates energy until the intimate opening has become something broader and more collective.
That expansion mirrors the writing. “We walk down firefly paths / we go where there’s no time / where there’s no yours and there’s no mine” places romance inside a landscape where ownership and boundaries begin to dissolve. Elsewhere, “She makes me better than I am” leaves its subject deliberately open: lover, earth, or some inseparable combination of the two. Baldy Crawlers allow those meanings to overlap rather than pinning the song to a single interpretation. Affection for another person and attentiveness to the natural world become different expressions of the same impulse.
Within Fais Toi Plaisir, Waterfall Laughter
also marks a change in temperature. Where Hatred?
introduced the project through restrained protest, this chapter loosens its shoulders. Folk foundations begin conversing with Latin jazz instincts; contemplation gives way to movement. The traditions remain audible, but Baldy Crawlers don’t preserve them behind glass. They let different musical languages meet, mingle and alter one another.
That may be the song’s most revealing idea. For Baldy Crawlers, reverence is not the same thing as stillness. It can move between languages, gather people together and dance. Waterfall Laughter
pays attention to the world by joining in with it.
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