duggup

Artist: Jennifer O’Connor
Website: www.matadorrecords.com/jennifer_oconnor/
Track Name: ?Exeter, Rhode Island?
Playback: mp3
Download?: Yes

I stumbled across Jennifer O’Connor in a review of her CD launch while reading the New York Times over the weekend. The article was Telling About Hard Times With Tidy, Infectious Songs By KELEFA SANNEH , it was such a good review and the paragraph that got me was

Back to “Exeter, Rhode Island,” an ambivalent song about a car trip. Perhaps she is a confessional singer-songwriter, but she has a winsome way of making her confessions sound matter-of-fact. “I drove through Exeter, Rhode Island, all alone,” she kept singing, and the verses filled in some gaps: “I’m on my way home to see you,” she sang, though she was also daydreaming about never going home, about staying in Exeter forever. And then, when the song was done, she deflated the daydream: “I never really spent any time in that town,” she said.

So naturally I wanted to find out if this was another epic road piece in the tradition of Kerouac or Springsteen, face it the one thing American songwriters excel at is a road song.

Well it’s not, what it turns out to be is a wonderful song, not epic at all but as the NYT review noted “these are tidy, infectious little songs”. And it is infectious. (As an aside have you ever noticed that you never hear an English road song? I wonder why that is. Although having been on the M25 parking lot once or twice I may have the inkling of an idea).

Here is some hype from her website…

‘Over The Mountain’ is her 3rd full-length, but it has the immediacy of a debut. The past year saw many personal upheavals which informed it more than she expected. “It’s been so tumultuous, I think that inevitably crept into my songs,” she says. “I wouldn’t say that I always write from experience, but I did a lot of it on this record.” For her most emotional songs yet, she self-produced and got rid of reverb and extraneous sounds, giving them an urgency that her other records didn’t always have. She explains, “There’s a lot of space; we purposefully pared everything down to what was necessary for the song.”

While Jennifer writes (and often performs) alone on guitar, each song here (save the acoustic single-take “Today”) is fleshed out with a band that includes her longtime drummer Jon Langmead, James McNew (Yo La Tengo) on bass, Kendall Meade (Sparklehorse) on keyboards & vocals, and other friends including Britt Daniel (Spoon) on vocals, and Al Weatherhead, who produced ‘Color…’ & plays guitar on many tracks.

The other track available on the website is Today, it’s just a voice and a guitar. It really is a poignant performance.

thatch is fascinated by guitars, music, guitars, production, silly noises, guitars and used to be a musician. Did I mention the thing about the guitars?
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