Sometymes Why
Four years ago Aoife O’Donovan, Ruth Ungar Merenda, and Kristin Andreassen spent a dozen hours recording ten songs, and casually slipped them into the marketplace, housed in a lovely black and silver letterpress package, an edition of one thousand.
It was and is a fetching record, both gloriously informal and gorgeously professional, for in their day jobs these three women are key players in the post-‘grass scene (trying to coin a phrase) as members of Crooked Still, the Mammals, and Uncle Earl. And so their self-titled debut didn’t so much slip into the marketplace as it loudly announced the almost endless possibilities of this new acoustic music.
This will be an unfair comparison, but in some ways the trio of Sometymes Why’s voices fits together for the same reasons David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash fit together: Despite their differences, the three have been schooled in the same traditions. And there’s luck involved. And they’re very good to start with (simply reckon producing a finished album in a dozen hours, and no matter if there may have been some post-production involved).
And, of course, there was that one song, “Too Repressed”, a giddily honest burst of frustrated and unmistakably female sexuality.
Well. Your Heart Is A Glorious Machine was recorded during a longer touring break in a proper studio, a converted church in Woodstock, New York, called Dreamland, where once upon the B-52s and other respectable musicians recorded. It is not a scrappily informal offering. It’s a real record, with overdubs and everything.
Both are very, very good albums. Puckish. And gorgeous, quite different and altogether the same. Do not discount the difficulty of that accomplishment.
It is, inevitably, all about those three voices, both as singers and as songwriters, equal throughout. As confessional songwriters, whimsical and honest. As musicians, as competent and engaging when considered as they are on the fly. Of course the new album opens not with a flourish from one of the many stringed instruments at which the singers excel, but with a Hammond B3. The song, “Aphrodisiaholic” (“I’m going to take you home, but please don’t tell your friends”), comes from Merenda’s pen, but is the natural companion to O’Donovan’s “Too Repressed”.
Sigh. A male critic focuses first on the two songs explicitly about sex. (In my defense, on the occasion of hearing both songs for the first time, I have both loved and respected them and wondered how I would feel if my daughter had written each. Does that mitigate?) The point, one hopes, is that they’re exceptional songs, far more beautiful to listen to than they are titillating. And far more subtle than any typed caricature.
As are they all, really, though I could do with out the cover of Concrete Blonde’s “Joey”, but, then, I could do without Concrete Blonde (though I understand the role they play in 1980s music as career models and such).
And, to return to the point: These three women, and their in-studio collaborators, are strikingly good. The songs they have written songs that apparently don’t fit the needs of their principal bands, which only tells you how very good those ensembles are are of the highest quality. Their voices, separately and together, are extraordinary, and lovely.
Back to CS&N, for a moment. Sometymes Why’s songs will neither change nor rearrange the world. They’re not political, beyond the politics of personal relationships. But they will inspire another generation of young songwriters. And they will delight us, or at least me, whenever they choose to share them. Whatever they choose to sing.