Greetings, gentle readers! My apologies for my
long absence. I’ve had a busy week. That busyness has not ended (in fact, I
took today off just to make sure I had time to get everything done) but I’m
taking a break to keep the Odyssey moving.
Over the course of the week I have listened exclusively
to this new record. This amounts to somewhere between eight and ten listens. I
can’t say exactly how many because as Dirty Harry Callahan would say, “to tell
the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost count myself.”
What I did rediscover is the joy of giving a
record a deep, immersive dive – the kind you do when you only own 20 records
instead of 2,000.
Alright then, let’s see what all this languorous
fuss is about. Then it is back to chores!
Disc 1302 is… Road to My Love
Artist:
Ana Egge
Year of Release: 2009
What’s up with the
Cover?
Ana, chillin’ out in a tank top. Ana looks kind of handy in this photo. Like
she could just as easily fix your motorcycle as sing you some folk songs.
How I Came to Know
It: I was listening to an album
by Canadian folk singer Matt Patershuk (2017’s “Same As I Ever Have Been,”
reviewed back at Disc 1234) and I kept hearing this great female voice
singing backup and harmony. I looked in the liner notes and discovered it was
Ana Egge. It turned out she is far more well-known than Patershuk (sorry Matt).
How It Stacks Up: Egge has 10 studio albums. I have two of them
and I’m on the lookout for four more (they’re devilishly hard to find). Of the
two I have, I’ll put “Road to My Love” in second.
Ratings: 4 stars
My media player has gotten a lot more creative
recently with how it categorizes music, adding judgy phrases like “old school”
to my early rap music, and occasionally throwing up its digital hands with “miscellaneous”
when sufficiently flummoxed with all the musical crossover of the modern world.
Labels are an annoyance anyway, because music
is music and should be taken on its own merits every time, but we music critics
sometimes apply them anyway because…well, hell, they save time.
For “Road to My Love,” the labelers in my
media player went with “contemporary folk” and for this record, it is a pretty
helpful start. Egge’s music has its roots in folk music, but there is a steady
stream of pop music present in the melodies, the instrumentation and the production.
I wanted all these pop sensibilities to annoy my purist tendencies, but try as
I might, I couldn’t get upset. Egge just does too good of a job of marrying the
styles into something uniquely her own.
The effect is the earthiness of folk music,
set in a warm and ambient bath of pop. It smooths out the edges that I was
sometimes hopeful to hear, but it also lets the journey feel contemplative and
relaxed. It soaks in a bit slower, but you get the feeling you’re in the
presence of an old soul, taking her time to tell you a story or two.
Folk music is very much about storytelling,
and Egge tells some good ones here. The one that always stands out is “Bully
of New York” a character study of someone who works as a Park Ranger in New
York’s Central Park. My only other cultural encounter with the Central Park
Rangers is as villains at the end of the Christmas movie “Elf” and it was great
to have Egge humanize them, through a chance encounter with one of them who
gave her a ride one day. This ranger is a decent man, resigned to his role doing
tasks like:
“I lock up the playgrounds, here
in the park
I am the bully of New York
It’s getting’ dark – so I turn
the keys
The kids all think I’m bein’ mean”.
His late hours contribute to his divorce, and
while he’s a sad man in a lonely job, Egge paints him with kindness, and
reminds us that deep down we’re all just people in need of love.
The ‘contemporary’ songs are also strong,
including the opening track “Storm Comin’” which has an up-tempo beat
that makes you want to do a little head bobbing at the back of bus. I may have
succumbed once or twice. I regret nothing.
Egge mixes the styles together on the sultry
longing of “The Sea Around You” which matches an introspective folksy
charm with the plaintive cry of electric guitar. As she does throughout the
record, Egge sings with a mix of breath and sweetness. Her phrasing generates emotional
energy on intimate admissions like:
“I dreamt of something I shouldn’t
do last night
I want too, I still might. I
still might.”
You get to hear a lot of different guitar
styles as well. “Red Queen” features a very light acoustic strum, and on
her cover of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” she plays a stripped-down Delta
blues slide style.
There are a lot of different treatments on “Road
to My Love” and there were times where it felt a bit too atmospheric, but I
found that over time I came to forgive the odd bit of horn or smooth jazz
lurking around the edges of the songs.
All that extra time with the record definitely
helped. On my first three listens I probably would have given it 3 stars, but in
the end it climbed up to 4. If your wondering if this is why a lot of records
you played the hell out of back when you only had 20 seem “better” than something
new you’ve had less time with, the answer is yes. And that’s OK – it doesn’t
make the love less real.
Best tracks: Storm Comin’, The Bully of New York, The Sea Around
You, Farmer’s Daughter, New Tattoo, Red Queen
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