CROW & GAZELLE

Crow and Gazelle is Oklahoma Red Dirt pioneer Mike McClure and multidisciplinary artist Chrislyn Lawrence; their musical and artistic partnership is central to the album’s force. McClure is a founding member of The Great Divide, an Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductee, and a widely respected producer whose work has helped shape artists including Cross Canadian Ragweed, Turnpike Troubadours, and Kaitlin Butts. Lawrence brings a different but equally vital language to the collaboration: poet, filmmaker, community organizer, trauma-informed healer, and storyteller. Together, they use their work to confront difficult questions about belief, belonging, grief, and the myths that govern our lives.

On May 15, the Texas-based duo will unveil Truth Be Told, their sophomore album - a sweeping, spiritually charged concept album about love, power, survival, and the truths buried beneath generations of fear. In it, the pair tell the story of a woman and a man navigating a collapsing world, reckoning with inherited harm, confronting patriarchal control, and searching for a more liberated way to live and love.

Told through the voice of a central feminine character and the partner who moves beside her, Truth Be Told unfolds like an intimate dialogue set against a rising rebellion. Across its songs, Crow and Gazelle challenge shame-based theology, confront the wounds left by misogyny and authoritarian religion, and expose the myths that sustain empires built on fear. At the heart of the record is a heroine hunted for speaking dangerous truths as she navigates a world bent on silencing women in order for its power structures to survive.

Again and again, the album returns to its core conviction: that liberation will not come through domination or violence, but through radical love. Rather than offering easy answers, the duo builds a new world, one where tenderness and defiance coexist, where spiritual deconstruction becomes an act of resistance, and where the divine feminine rises back to the center of the story. “Remembering is the revolution,” Lawrence explains. “Recovering my divine worth meant deconstructing organized religion and undoing the lies that taught me to see myself as unworthy and separate from creation. Once truth was restored, I realized we are powerful beyond measure. We don’t need anyone else to save us, we just need to remember what is real.”

Crow and Gazelle write songs built around poetry, sparse but reverent instrumentation, and entangled harmonies, creating a sound that feels intimate and apocalyptic all at once.