The second album by Milwaukee folkies Patty Stevenson and Craig Siemsen brings together two singular but complementary musical personalities. Stevenson’s songs tend toward personal vignettes from which she draws more universal application; Siemsen generally takes more abstract approaches, leaving listeners to interpret the lyrics as they may. In their collaborative yin and yang, neither is straightjacketed into their preferred tack, though. Since the two never properly duet, but instead sing background on each other’s solo vocals, the whole of Paint Me a Picture comes off a bit like a mash up of two short individual solo albums.
Within that unusual structure, Stevenson and Siemsen touch upon the solaces of friendship, agrarian life, family and labor solidarity—the latter with one of the gentlest anthems ever recorded for the cause. Speaking of working folk, late hometown activist/singer-songwriter Larry Penn figures into the twosome’s remake choices, as do current Milwaukee folkie Brett Kemnitz and country-music pioneers The Carter Family. It all adds up to one compositionally balanced Picture.
