I Am Both, by Margaret Glaspy
The term “Dylanesque” contains as much breadth and depth as the term “Beatlesque,” and it is even more malleable. Margaret Glaspy grasps those dimensions on her fourth album, I Am Both.
A decade after her startlingly thoughtful debut, Emotions and Math, Glaspy also fully grasps the details and sense impressions that make a song as rich and vivid as a short story, with the voice to sketch, shade, and smudge the feelings that words can’t entirely convey.
The voice expertly adjusts the balance between tunefulness and rawness. In “That Rose,” Glaspy sings with desire as palpably restrained as her guitar chords; in “I Thought She Was a Song,” she slips into the cool her younger self admired in a classmate; and in “Wildest Dreams,” her hush carries prayerful gratitude.
In that third song, producer Joe Henry builds a dusty chapel of gospel-folk music. Throughout the album, his singer-songwriter instincts and his recording experience—Joan Baez and Elvis Costello are two bigger names among his numerous credits—match Glaspy’s visions with the right sounds.
For “Petty,” those sounds are Patrick Warren’s distant-thunder piano notes, Jay Bellerose’s ticking-clock handclaps and ominous cymbal washes, and Ross Gallagher’s cobwebbed bass, alongside Glaspy’s cautious guitar and incautious stoppered rage during a domestic disagreement.
With that trio and Henry as her constant companions, Glaspy tenderly uncovers fear and threat in the ballad “Sharp Knife,” swings to the quieter rhythms of city streets while describing the failures of “James and Marie,” and shivers with the cold and righteousness of an escapee in “Michigan.”
In “Martin Luther King Jr.,” her plainly blown harmonica, simple arrangement, and declarative lyrics reach back to pre-electric Dylan for hope and sincerity.
Margaret Glaspy can hold that old sincerity while existing as an assertively modern woman. The superficial contradiction disappears when she proves how she, like the song at the end of this album, embodies the title I Am Both.
|
|
Preview the album:
