There is nothing more “big tent” than Rock Music. Beneath this overarching rubric, a multitude of styles jostle (some not so amiably). But I think we can agree on the fact of wealth in abundance under this big tent.

In the beginning came that breakout blast of energy (Great Balls of Fire indeed), and then the story of a widening cosmos of varying forms, evolving and reacting and interacting. But you know it's Rock, no matter how sideways from the source it has slid, when you get, somewhere within it, the feel of The Beat, that bop of primal motion.

Though the nature of Rock is to perpetually renew itself (often, mythically enough, by seeking to destroy the old gods in pursuit of new modes of expression) we nonetheless have real history, real ages of the music, which amount to both great solid shoulders upon which to stand and play, and a glorious tradition to wander through at our pleasure and draw inspiration from.

We are now in a kind of post-everything period. It's almost hodge-podge. Anything, done well, could work, presumably—have an audience, evade the deathray of being typed uncool. But this seems to make having the handle of a category all the more imperative. We desperately need a way to differentiate what tumbles so plentifully out of this cornucopia. And however superficial commercial pigeonholing may be, styles really do represent distinctive energy zones. Genre-casting is not necessarily a bad thing. There are very good artists/groups who go for a single rich vein, and mine it pretty much exclusively.

But let's set that class of single-style achievers on one side and look at the rest of the field. Is it not clear that the standout artists/groups here tend to be magnificently diverse? No matter how identifiable the sound may be, the songs themselves are quite separate things, one from the other, and take us to very different places. They demonstrate real range in their songwriting, a familiarity with all kinds of ways a song can be, and take its grip on the listener.

Creativity recognizes other creativity and reaches out—it has to. And the more wide-ranging the creativity, the more the product of an open ear roving the vast musical landscape it is bound to be. Originality is perhaps less about origination than transformation and rebirth.

So we come circuitously to The Wellworkers Guild. Think of The Wellworkers Guild as a child of the Rock Era, running delightedly about the endless garden. Think of it as a variegated creative impulse that is at once original and referential. This impulse may rely on that late 60's expansiveness, the new frontier exploring, and it surely displays a taste for 70's complexity as well. But the Guild Ear has heard everything—the entire span of rock-infused decades—and has taken from that an aspiration to be timeless.

So, what is this well that is being worked? First we answer with another question… How can it be that the mere ordering of sound by pitch and rhythm causes it to reach right in and grab us by the soul? Make us jump up and dance in sheer elation? Strike our hearts with the most exquisite melancholy? You could wax metaphysical about this but in plain English, we're onto something deep here. And that's where the idea of the well comes in—tapping into that wondrous, inexplicable resource, and working it, drawing it forth and making it available. For such an undertaking one must possess the necessary devotion, and have mastered certain arcane techniques, and be willing to embrace the necessary labor, and play well with peers—hence the Guild.

The Wellworkers Guild is the brainchild of Peter Kim-Fredell, a participant of long standing in the ever more crowded and “democratized" arena of music-making. He is perhaps best known for being the founder of the group Stone Soup, an acoustic quasi-trad band whose (to date) single release reflects a rare extremity of eclecticism, one that might be unmatched on the planet. Whereas Stone Soup grew out of a later-developed love of folk and world music, and looks for originality through innovative renditions of existing material, The Wellworkers Guild is rooted in a life contemporaneous with the age of Rock, and is all about all-original material.

Peter first started performing his own songs in his high school band The Primitives (a band-name good enough to be taken up elsewhere a while later) and has written continuously (if a bit sporadically) ever since. A couple of the songs on CALL IT HOME were previously performed, albeit in a different manner, by the erstwhile rock band Uncle Thump (of which, unfortunately, no picture is at hand) but never released on record. While those who knew it may regret the demise of that short-lived enterprise, this turn of events did leave him to take matters into his own hands and start down the path that has led to The Wellworkers Guild.

The Wellworkers Guild reflects a certain kind of artistic coming home, because it's most natural for Peter to operate like a composer, coming from what you might call a big picture approach. While everything may start out straightforwardly as a song (in the way that any songwriter might work), the act of recording becomes a compositional field where the goal is for the arrangement (the accompanying ensemble elements together with the structural development) to come together so as to fully unfold the blossom of the song from its original bud. This is hardly a unique aspiration among all the good music that has come into the world, but it is what The Wellworkers Guild seeks to do.

John Bagale, an experienced and widely adept musician with whom Peter has worked for a numbr of years, has played the drumkit on the new release, and that term is definitely intentional. He addresses the drums as a single instrument. Though his role on Call It Home is as the Keeper of the Sacred Beat, John plays a lot of piano, flute-type wind instruments, and is pretty much of a jazz theory heavy. He trails a long and varied history of musical accomplishment behind him.

A second project is on the drawing board for The Wellworkers Guild, likely using a bigger Guild roster. Look for it…in its own time…