The Court Singer is Part 1 of A Year and a Day, the delightful retelling of the classic story of Thomas the Rhymer, a 13th-century Scottish harper, singer, and teller of taleswho has a life-changing encounter with none other than The Queen of Faerie. The Court Singer moves its main character, a man called Thomas Lear, from the pages of that myth and into the American Pop Music scene in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s.
This Thomas, an enormously successful musician, flees LA for Scotland after a disheartening series of personal worsts. There, like The Rhymer in the story, he meets a beautiful lady he attempts to seduce. She seduces him first, but her game comes with a strange, almost enchanting, condition: Thomas must walk away from his fame and the world he knows for a full year and a day. He will be expected to spend that time with her, to do her bidding (which has much to do with seduction), create new music for her, and play and sing it for the people who serve her.
The beautiful lady in question is indeed The Queen of Faerie. He doesn't believe her when she tells him so, but she doesn't mind. She has played this game before.
Bored and frustrated with events and internal monsters, Thomas recognizes that he is heading for a dangerous fall into drugs and endless layers of creative failure; he has entirely lost sight of who he is. With a sense that he has nothing much to lose, Thomas playfully agrees to the Queen's rules of engagement in exchange for the seduction, never imagining that by doing so, he has crossed the wide chasm between what he knows to be true, and what can't possibly be truebut actually is.
As Thomas comes to know the Queen and her interesting people, he discovers new music, friends, elements of love's many faces, the gift of silence, a touch of danger, and the possibility of personal redemption that may bring him to terms with his own sense of his truest self.
Join Thomas in Elvenhome. Listen to the music; it's everywhere. Eat with him, drink with him, meet his fascinating variety of friends and neighbors, and make merry as Thomas moves through his Year and a Day.
From start to finish, it's an experience Thomas Lear will never forget.