Hello, gentle readers and please forgive my extended absence. I’ve been travelin to Seattle to see my beloved Miami Dolphins play a game of football. The Dolphins were soundly trounced, but despite the terrible result it was a lovely trip, surrounded as I as by dear friends and good times.
Disc 1768 is…Ramona
Artist: Grace Cummings
Year of Release: 2024
What’s up with the Cover? Grace displays an awkward but undeniable beauty as she half sits on a chain link fence, maybe in someone’s backyard. The pose looks uncomfortable, but she seems resistant to moving. Or maybe the dress is snagged on the fence, and she is trying to avoid a tear. Is this a simple backyard repose or is this a wardrobe emergency!
We don’t know. We can’t know. We can only wish Grace the best.
How I Came To Know It: I know Grace Cummings through her previous two records which I LOVE. Buying this one was a very easy decision.
How It Stacks Up: I have three Grace Cummings albums, and the other two are just too damned good, dropping “Ramona” into third place.
Ratings: 4 stars
The ghostlike warble of Grace Cummings will drench you with strange and powerful emotions. This experience is an inevitability even if - as is the case with her third album, “Ramona” - it took a while before it fully reached inside of me.
On previous records, Cummings impact was immediate, and on my first couple of listens to “Ramona” I experienced disappointment as I impatiently waited for the same magic to happen. Nothing Grace Cummings does could be described as accessible, the notion is just too routine and pedestrian to suit the weird and wonderful vocal antics she gets up to. But “Ramona” took a couple of extra listens before I felt the feels.
Which, after a good five or six listens in seems hard to believe, now that I find myself fully under this record’s spell. I think it is just that she takes her melodic structures one step even further into the unlikely, and that step is a precarious and uncertain one; like crossing a brook on slick stones covered in wet moss. Magical and whimsical but with no guarantee you’ll reach the other side.
While the music takes a bit of immersion to reveal itself, her poetic talent is on full display from the outset. The record’s first song, “Something Going ‘Round” opens with:
“The wind it is howling
Like dogs in the evening”
It’s the perfect scene-setter, made even better by the evening howl that is Cummings’ voice.
The majestic and slow-moving beauty of “Something Going ‘Round” is immediately followed by the insistent gallop of “On and On,” which feels like a Springsteen ballad, if instead of a blue-collar town you were in an enchanted castle.
The record is replete with stories of love that is so overwrought it will break you through the sheer weight of its passion. On “Love and the Canyon” Cummings croons:
“The canyon is forgiving
Maybe I’ll meet some Hollywood man
Who drives a million dollars into town.”
It feels like dustbowl L.A., as seen through the back lot of an abandoned movie lot at sunset. None of that is explicit, but Cummings paints word pictures that encourage the listener to take their own flights of fancy. Maybe it is just me, but the record seems built to inspire internal reverie.
As I mentally danced my way through these image rich tales, each iteration became easier and easier to absorb. Before too long those slick stones were lily pads that I danced across weightless as I listened.
With the exception of the title track at #7, the record’s opening third is the best part, and if you are only listening to these tunes as singles, that’s where you’ll find them. I wouldn’t encourage that approach though. The album is not just a collection of songs, but more like one long poem, divided into 11 movements, finally ending with this last stanza from “Help Is On It’s Way”:
“Your guitar
It weeps a naive melody
And if you see her
Say hello
Pick up your heart of gold”
Don’t worry if these final words sound jarring and external to your experience where you expected revelation. It happened to me too. Go back immediately and listen to it again clear through. You’ll find it start to sink in like the extended hymn to the human heart that it is.
Best tracks: Something Going ‘Round, On and On, I’m Getting Married to the War, Love and the Canyon, Ramona
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