Mythologist Joseph Campbell once wrote, “Love is a friendship set to music.” For Alexei & Channy Moon Casselle, husband and wife who began playing as Roma di Luna five years ago, that love is too big not to share. What started as a simple yet profound folk-singing duo on the 2006 EP Face of My Friends and 2007s Find Your Way Home began to develop as a band on 2008’s Casting the Bones. Now with full-time band members in the dynamic rhythm section of Ben Durrant, James Everest and Ryan Lovan, as well as vocalist Jessi Prusha, Roma di Luna has come into it’s own on the forthcoming full-length Then The Morning Came.
Then The Morning Came weaves together influences of roots, bluegrass, gospel, psychedelia and soul, arrangements the new band members brought to the structures supplied by Channy & Alexei. Channy's evocative voice remains front and center, surrounded by a magnificent array of sounds and textures inspired by the collaborative and adventurous approach the whole band took to producing the album. Recorded from April of 2009 to July 2010 at Crazy Beast Studio (Dosh, Andrew Bird) the process of Then The Morning Came was surrounded by births and deaths, often beset by a chaos and confusion that almost stopped the music-making altogether. Rising from challenges, the new life of the four babies who were born to the band members during recording was a source of comfort and strength. Channy wrote of the time, “Most of these songs were written and recorded with my newborn daughter in my arms. They are a reflection of the life and death surrounding her first year on this earth, the love and the madness I found in myself and the amity of all my fears.”
With the love and growth of the Roma di Luna family, Then The Morning Came builds on the traditions of the band and the cornerstones of American music, but contains its own exciting locomotive power. With a group of musicians as talented as Roma di Luna, it is no surprise that they have taken those roots and made a powerful record that is wholly and passionately their own.