Her Crooked Heart – To Love To Leave To Live
Sodak Records – 31 May 2019
Following three albums under her own name as well as an EP with Anais Mitchell, Minneapolis-based Rachel Ries launches her new project with a song cycle album inspired by her recent divorce. Working with musicians that include Alec Spiegelman on flute and clarinet, Pat Keen on upright bass, pedal steel player Ben Lester, multi-instrumentalist producer Shane Leonard and Rob Moose responsible for the string parts, it opens with the piano accompanied Letters, to and from, reflections on the road about a new love left back at home. More musically fleshed-out with guitars and drums, the slow-paced Courthouse gets into the divorce nitty-gritty as she moves from panic – “I’ve given up my home/What have I done?” – to the defiant assertion that “I’m just a lady taking back her name.”
Adopting a waltzing sway, again heavily piano-based Enough continues the theme as it opens on the line “I’ve been foolish thinking you’d change into the man I want” as she prepares to make the break, the track, as with much of the album, evoking thoughts of a less dramatic, less mannered Tori Amos.
Orchestral flourishes wash through the languid, drifting Pleasant Valley Reservoir with its swooping vocals, a song that addresses ideas of appearance and reality as what sounds like a “lush, rested place” is in fact “a sewage plant”, giving way to a more optimistic note on the scratchy, fingerpicked Young Love Is Nothing as the heart recovers and reaches out again.
The title mirroring its musical framework with the brooding strings intro, muted drums, yearning pedal steel, choral backing vocals and dissonant percussion, Windswept finds her caught in indecision, bruised by the past but wary of the future (“are you just a panacea?”) linking into the waltzing piano frills, swathed strings and echoing vocals of I Fell In Love which, rather than what the title suggests, is about taking refuge in the darkness (“the longest hours with no relief”) before coming to the conclusion that from the dark comes light and that “the song will carry on.”
Upright bass sets the rhythm for the jazz-tinged soul of the tempo-shifting two-minute Are You Good You Are, another move towards the light where she declares “you’ve got my heart right where I wanted it to be”, the album continuing its upwards emotional trajection with the spare, strummed acoustic Loving You that confessionally revisits what went wrong in order to move on as she sings “finally I think I’m ready to love someone new, but before I do I’m gonna catalogue the truth of what it was like loving you“, apparently like “a tiptoe down the hallway always hoping not to wake up the storm” and “a kiss that was three parts whiskey.”
Things slide into Americana territory with the piano and pedal steel strains of For A Song, a familiar theme of the healing power and stability of music in which it also becomes a metaphor for a home in harmony, finally ending with the simple fingerpicked Lamentation, a final bittersweet closing of the door and not looking back on what has gone, coming to a close on wistful flugelhorn notes.
A hugely personal album with universally recognisable feelings that range from despondency to euphoria, it takes a while to seep inside your mind and spirit, but, as with a bruised and broken heart, it’s worth persevering so as to experience the relief of it beating again.
Her Crooked Heart UK & Ireland Tour Dates
Thursday 20th June – The Stables, Milton Keynes
Saturday 22nd June – Old Refreshment Room, Wrington
Sunday 23rd June – Green Note, London
Monday 24th June – The Greystones, Sheffield
Tuesday 25th June – The Cobblestone, Dublin IE
Wednesday 26th June – Roisin Dubh, Galway IE
Friday 28th June – Levis’, Ballydehob IE
Saturday 29th June – No Alibis, Belfast NI
Sunday 30th June – The Doublet, Glasgow
Tuesday 2nd July – The Leith Depot, Edinburgh
Thursday 4th July – The Old Forge, Cranford, Kettering
Friday 5th July – Hyde Tavern, Winchester
Monday 8th July The Hatch, Totnes
Find out more here: https://www.hercrookedheart.com/
https://hercrookedheart.bandcamp.com/
Photo Credit: Nate Ryan