On “Chasing Spirits,” Williamson references her own work as she points out the flaw in having written songs for an ex: “ Are my love songs lies now that the love is gone?/ There’s the one about forever and/ Loving you in a past life/ Or whatever.” The steel guitar sounds mournful here, augmenting the mood of melancholy that her words create.įor the most part, Time Ain’t Accidental is not a heartbroken record. On “Hunter,” she reflects wryly on a relationship ending: “ Baby it’s fine, I’da blown your mind/ But I guess I’m gonna give you space,” she sings over insistent piano and the occasional assertive flourish of steel guitar. Williamson seems rueful, yet not brokenhearted here. Her lyrics, too, have a kind of saucy new boldness on songs like on the title track, in which she sings “ I read you Raymond Carver by the pool bar like a lady/ Known you for a while but you’d been someone else’s baby/ When the rain picked up we took a drive, I had a rental/ Torn up over timing, but time ain’t accidental.” A gentle, surprising sax outro by Matt Douglas (Josh Ritter, The Mountain Goats) on this track joins banjo and dobro played by Phil Cook (Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger). She sings audaciously and not as breathily as she once did. Williamson has always had a poised delivery, but there is a breezy new confidence to her singing on Time Ain’t Accidental. Then she turned to making her own album, working with producer Brad Cook (The War on Drugs, Fenne Lily) in North Carolina. First, she joined with Waxahatchee (aka Katie Crutchfield) to make the excellent album I Walked With You a Ways under the name Plains. Williamson had a longtime relationship with another musician right before Covid, and while the ensuing breakup upended many of her hopes and plans, it opened a new path forward for her. “That’s all that’ll save you.Jess Williamson’s last album was called Sorceress, but Time Ain’t Accidental casts a spell of its own–one of self-liberation. “You gotta let someone in,” as he puts it on the title track. All those musical references can help make it seem like Quietly Blowing It is offering prophetic wisdom even when Taylor is merely just trying to write himself out of hard times. On Quietly Blowing It he embraces his role as roots synthesizer, conjuring and quoting everyone from Sly Stone and Curtis Mayfield to Rod Stewart and John Prine. įaced with a period of prolonged seclusion, Taylor turned, as ever, to his record collection. But Taylor has grown immensely as a melodicist and arranger (he self-produced this album) in the ensuing decade, and the LP, which features contributions from longtime companions like Josh Kaufman and Scott Hirsch, is full of the collaborative warmth of recent Hiss landmarks like Heart Like a Levee. On “Sanctuary,” meanwhile, the comfort of loving embrace offers respite amidst devastation.Īs one might expect from a record made during a time of intense isolation, much of the music on Quietly Blowing It feels solitary, subdued, and contemplative, calling to mind, at times, the cloistered folk of earlier Hiss records like 2012’s Poor Moon. Inner turmoil bleeds into a sense of shared tragedy and vice versa throughout its 11 songs: On the title track, the song’s narrator, dealing with interpersonal unrest, glances at the television and notices that “there’s a riot goin’ on” outside the walls of his home as well as inside. Written and recorded largely during the earliest months of the pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020, Quietly Blowing It maintains an ever-present sense of calamity, both personal and collective. Taylor’s mournful meditation on a year of loss, grief, and upheaval may be more sparse and sedated than the 2019 Brad Cook and Aaron Dessner-assisted Terms of Surrender, but this offering of solemn joy and hopeful sorrow is also the most timely record of his career. Rarely do songwriters who release original music so often manage to make each release feel as necessary as Taylor - A nd no Hiss Golden Messenger record has ever felt more necessary than his new LP, Quietly Blowing It. But more impressive than the sheer quantity of the North Carolina singer-songwriter’s output is the degree of spiritual sensitivity, compositional craft, and high-stakes emotional urgency Taylor has been able to bring to each collection in such quick succession. Taylor has released four new albums (and a slew of outtakes compilations and live records) under the moniker of his country-soul recording outfit, Hiss Golden Messenger.
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