June Madrona's second album The Winged Life is a two part concept detailing love and life. Themed and titled after a work of William Blake's, this album rests softly on the light subjects, graces the heavy, and creates beauty out of the apparently mundane. The lineup on this record is comprised of four people making use of guitar, cello, harp, glockenspiel, banjo, and of course, their voices. Group collaboration and orchestration has brought the band to a whole new level of performance on this record. This second printing includes a hand-screened cover and a 16 page booklet featuring lyrics, artwork, and photos. "On my favorite June Madrona song, they sing, "Last night I dreamt that Portland filled up with gardens/and people on bicycles passing me by/and streets lined with fruit trees." June Madrona is Olympia's Ross Cowman, Onyx Dixon, and Christopher Schile turning guitar, voice, harp, and cello into careful, stately folk. It's nice. Like summer in Portland." -Portland Mercury "The fragile plucks that open June Madrona's "An Early Spring" could pass for a lullabye before the sadness to come begins to creep in. It's an amazingly graceful fade of emotion, taking you from unease to nostalgia, and then the cello kicks in and you realize there's more than wistfulness here. This is an elegy for the open fields and farmland of childhood, paved and peopled by inexorable suburban expansion. The folks fighting I-933 should make this their campaign song." -The Olympian