Akin to Damon and Naomi, Alan and Mimi from Low, or even Yo La Tengo’s Ira and Georgia minus all the noodling, Ida boasts at its heart newlyweds Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell. Michael Littleton and Karla Schickele hold down the bottom, joined by a slew of well-placed guest musicians; tender harmonic dissonance and minor-key moods are sustained with male-female vocal dances, sweet and slow acoustic melodic tension. Strings, wurlitzer, accordion and piano gently wander round alternately terse and loping guitar lines, providing the sticky web in which life stories are woven.
Simple, lovely, necessary, Will You Find Me — one of two albums rescued from major-label fallout by the band — is both examination of and meditation on what happens when people fall into one another’s lives, bare their most vulnerable selves, and learn to stay or lose trying. A woman prays to be made one “whose love knows how to wait.” A sweetheart asks for a silent confirmation that she is still desired. Against a shattered drumbeat that might well be echoing hearts, a couple intones, “And some things can’t be burned/Even when they yearn to die.”
Ida’s precise lyrical images fit desperately lovely arrangements like a chin nuzzles into the crook of a neck. Together, they provide the glimpses that define not so much the right-nows, but the turning points where love went round a corner. They are the very pictures imprinted on our most secret selves, to be looked back upon with the hazy wonder of intimacy that makes such turns small miracles of faith.