It's universal: a familiar tune starts playing in a crowded room, and given enough time, the whole room responds.  The guy down the bar with the Bluetooth and the suit taps his foot; the keep cleaning up empties hums the chorus; the group of giggling college girls, a tangle of tanned legs and flip-flops in a corner booth, shout out a line; the barfly whose voice is already a little smeary and collegial with drink murmurs along.  All are welcome.  Whether it's a raucous dirty blues, a down-home folk song, or a tender lament that catches the breath and the heart in one fell, whispered swoop, shared songs reach in and tug that familiar space behind our ribs.  They give us an immediate bond to one another.  They're a vent for deeper, more primal emotional realities than we can verbalize.  And they create a small, spontaneous space where something bigger, greater, and more profound than the sum of all the musical parts can unfold and blossom.

It's universal--and lovingly culled, captured, and encouraged by Bifrost Arts.  Equally inspired by Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, the deeply personal hymns of Isaac Watts, and the rich writing legacy of the Brill Building, Bifrost Arts reaches into the rich history of sacred music to unearth forgotten treasures and introduce new hymnodies.  With care, they craft each song and spiritual to encompass the glory, the fall, and the in-between--the diamond, the rough, and the friction where they meet; the place where we all live every day.  And taking its cues from the Psalmists, who wrote their fears and doubts and joys to be sung, Bifrost Arts moves the music and all its emotional and spiritual realities out of the studio and into crowded living rooms, rowdy bars, and neighborhood churches, providing songbooks and lead sheets so all can join in.  Because Song--the form, the genre, the lifeblood of Americana--should be shared.  Their projects are about friends connecting with friends, doubters and believers sharing the same bench, and broken people singing their hope.

Started by high school friends Isaac Wardell and Joseph Pensak in the summer of 2007, Bifrost Arts' inaugural project "Come, O Spirit!" began with a few modest demos swapped between friends and swelled into a sweeping chamber pop anthology of hymns and spirituals. In the spirit of Alan Lomax, Wardell and co-producer/multi-instrumentalist Mason Neely traveled the country, visiting NYC living rooms, Connecticut basements, Seattle barns, and Kentucky farmhouses to record intimate, heartfelt and often impromptu performances by artists like David Bazan, Leigh Nash (of Sixpence None the Richer), Rosie Thomas, Damien Jurado, Denison Witmer, Shara Worden, and Laura Gibson.  Voices cracked, laughs bellowed, and the tape kept rolling.  "Come, O Spirit!" is the first in a planned multi-volume anthology from Bifrost Arts.