The Well Pennies Take Joyous Flight on ‘Murmurations’
For their second full-length album, Murmurations, The Well Pennies have their eyes on the skies. The album’s title comes from the name for swooping swarms of starlings that form for no reason we humans know and move according to rules also hidden to us. The stars and the moon play lead roles in nearly all of the songs here, and the album is filled with harmonies, hooks, and lyrics that evoke bright sunshine and a wide-open horizon.
If you’re looking for a sad song, this isn’t your kind of place. Married duo Bryan and Sarah Vanderpool find plenty of depth in themes of hope and encouragement, love and longing that has a good chance of being fulfilled. It feels like a celebration, and as much as I love sad songs, it’s nice to just revel in feeling happy for the space of these 13 songs (and in the lingering glow they leave). “Ooh La La” is a prime example of the folk-pop perfection the Vanderpools weave, with lyrics like “But hope’s a honey in the air / A melody around you when no one else is there / Wait, wait for the sunlight” to clear away any bad moods that may cling and a melody that practically demands to be sung along with.
Songs like “Oh My Blue Sky” and “My Morning Star” sound perfectly suited for the ending of a TV show where everything finally turns out OK. In fact, many of these songs do, and I’m not alone in catching that vibe. Previous Well Pennies songs have been featured on The Fosters, Switched at Birth, True Blood, and more.
It’s easy to assume that happy songs are vapid songs, bubbling along to handclaps (fair warning: there are some handclaps on this record) and major key moods without stopping for introspection or deep thought. But Murmurations songs show roots in real life, and that’s why they resonate. The Vanderpools met in Boston and tried out life in Los Angeles for a while before relocating before this album to Des Moines, Iowa. (You can read the story behind that here.) That journey, and the effort to find the right fit, shows up in several songs, including “Oh My Blue Sky’s chorus “I’m a-gonna keep on moving ‘til I’m who I wanna be,” and, from “My Morning Star,” “There’s a fire that’s brewing in me / there’s a world that I’m longing to see / where the wind is alive and moves like a song / yeah this is where I belong.”
Musically, the depth comes from a sprinkling of unexpected elements, like syncopated fiddle chirps and a dreamy string winddown in “The Wonderkind” and the abrupt dropout of a lush string arrangement in “Calliope” that leaves only a lovely vocal and spacey piano from Sarah Vanderpool to underscore the fuzziness, then focus, of finding a sense of home in a loved one. String arrangements by multi-instrumentalist Tim Weed, in fact, are used to great effect throughout the album, augmenting the intertwined harmonies and catchy melodies in ways that deepen the mood. Most surprisingly, perhaps, Murmurations ends with an instrumental track, just piano and strings. “The Starling” evokes musically the murmuration for which the album is named, diving and swooping and soaring with the wind and unseen forces only nature understands. Who knows what drives all of us here on the ground? The Well Pennies don’t provide an answer to that, but they do tell us where we might look for one.