Constance: The Compendium

The 47-page companion book to The Restoration's southern-gothic concept album, Constance. Featuring lyrics, short story, family trees, 1912 map, timeline, and shape note score for "Thy Sword, Thy Shield". *CD NOT INCLUDED. Set between the late 1800s and 1940s in Lexington, SC, Constance focuses on songwriter Daniel Machado's fictional Vale family. Machado's protagonist is Constance Owen, an unrealized musical prodigy born to poor cotton farmers several years after the American Civil War. Her eventual union with Aaron Vale, a carpenter and musician of mixed race from Chicago, and the birth of their son, Thomas, plants a seed of discriminative hate in the surrounding community, bringing about the bankrupting of her family by the affluent Palmers, the related death of her husband, and the burying of her creative aspirations. Years later, Thomas' nihilistic vengeance against the Palmers sets off a cataclysmic series of violent events, as the South and the rest of the world plunge into the Great Depression.