Michaela Anne – Desert Dove
Yep Roc – 27 September 2019
Co-produced by Sam Outlaw and Kelly Winrich (both of whom contribute rhythm guitar) and featuring guitarist Brian Whelan, fiddler Kristin Weber and Mark Stepro and Daniel Bailey on drums, this is Michael Anne’s third album and her first for Yep Roc. While her previous work has been largely honky-tonk rooted, this is more wide-ranging in its country shadings, opening with By Design, a string swept midtempo number about domestic content “making a little family/With barely a dime and some troubled times” and “gettin’ by on dreams”.
That same widescreen feel enfolds One Heart, a cautionary number about trying too hard to connect, evoking thoughts of Stevie Nicks with bottleneck and streaming pedal steel clouds before the cascading chords and steady drumbeat of I’m Not The Fire, a co-write with Outlaw and Jamie Kent that delivers the first of her more familiar country sound, a song about being responsible for your own wellbeing in a dysfunctional relationship that sports the catchy line “I’m not the fire, I’m just the smoke”.
Likewise, another Outlaw co-write, the musically similar highway cruising breeziness of Child Of The Wind and, reflecting her army kid childhood, its theme of restlessness and independence (“My hometown was a back seat/Looking out at highway signs…Always coming through and taking off again”) before the Texicali strings sweep back in for the aching mid-tempo ballad Tattered, Torn and Blue (And Crazy), her voice quivering with Emmylou hints on a song of betrayal (“I had friend but she turned her back on me”) and yearning that reps a particular standout.
Loneliness and the search for self-contentment are there too in the title track, wind chimes introducing a portrait of a prostitute and, underscore by keening pedal steel, her mixed emotions about what she does (“You love them all the way they want and they need / But tell me who does your heart wish to please?”) and whether the men “think he’s the only one with pain”. That feminist undercurrent bursts the banks on If I Wanted Your Opinion, a twangy guitar, barroom-friendly co-write with Mary Bragg that gives the finger to male condescension (“To all of you cowboys whistling at all the pretty ladies, What makes you think we can’t buy our own drinks/And that every queen is waiting for a king?”). Similarly musically upbeat road trip, Run Away With Me, again written with Outlaw, returns to the theme of finding freedom and heading down whatever lost highway comes along while, again touching on Stevie Nicks, the five and a half minute folk-pop flavoured country Somebody New is about breaking away from a relationship that, like day-old coffee, has run its course (“I think I lost my mind like the selfish kind I hate/Or maybe I just listened to myself to know our fate/If it’s in the face of another that we love and live/I saw myself in yours ’til I had no more to give”) because “sometimes love runs out”.
The remaining two tracks take the pace down, Two Fools a classic honky-tonk tears on the dancefloor waltzer in the Patsy Cline manner with the album coming to a close with the simply strummed sway of Be Easy and, the sounds of the ocean in the background, a return to the elusive search for peace of mind when the world weighs you down as she sings about not being kinder to yourself and that “When bitterness and pain have darkened your heart and mind/I will love you just the same as when you are full of light”.
Three years ago, Bright Lights and the Fame served as her breakthrough to a wider audience and airplay, Desert Rose should comfortably see her in full bloom.