Lynn Miles – We’ll Look For Stars
Continental Song City – 3 July 2020
We’ll Look For Stars is Lynne Miles’ first material since her collaboration with Lynne Hanson in The LYNNeS and her sixteenth solo release. It finds her on a career-high, her voice never better, starting out with the opening hymnal grand piano ballad title track, a close companion to Art Garfunkel’s All I Know, about the strength of love and connection in the face of whatever life and death brings and “our little boat will rock from side to side”.
Strummed on a high strung guitar sounding like a dulcimer and featuring Wurlitzer and accordion, The Saddest Song I Ever Wrote is another stellar track. Dreamily cascading chords conjure clear evening autumn skies and pure breezes on another lyric concerning mortality where life’s “a party everybody leaves way too soon” and about giving it everything while you can (“tonight I’m gonna sing/Like I never sang before“).
Featuring Rebecca Campbell on harmony and Greg Leisz on Weissenborn, the tempo picks up slightly for the gently country jog of A Heart Can Only Take So Much, a number about finally giving up on a relationship that takes to much effort (“I can’t believe I stayed so long/does that mean I’m weak or does that mean I’m strong“) glows with the same emotion and melody you’d find in the very best of Emmylou Harris, and talking of country legends, she follows this with Merle, a honky-tonk waltz tribute to the late Bakersfield country legend that neatly references some of his greatest hits.
Leisz on pedal steel, Restless rides a funkier country rhythm that belies its downbeat lyrics about feeling trapped somewhere so devoid of all joy and meaning (“I guess I should have run before the weather turned/waited too long now the highway’s burned/nothing quite as empty as a dreamless world“) before, slowing things down again for the gorgeous Old Soul. Fingerpicked and accompanied by just producer Dave Draves on accordion, it’s an emotionally resonant sketch of a woman whose fathomless heart’s travelled a rocky path and “paid the toll“, but “if there’s a chance she’ll take it/If there’s a rule she’ll break it” and who “when she looks at you she looks straight down into your heart/she won’t remember your name but she’ll remember your pain/make you feel like a work of art“.
Lyrically echoing A Heart Can Only Take So Much (“I tried to be kind then I tried to be tough/then I gave in, but it wasn’t enough… sometimes the best thing to do is let go“), the carousel swaying arrangement reflecting the title, The World Is Spinning is a piano (and toy piano) and strummed guitar post-break-up reflection (“so now it’s anti-depressants and pinot noir“) with the aural freshness of a mountain stream. Adding slide to the textures, things get darker yet on the scuffed rhythm She Drinks, another post-breakup reflection (“She said I bet everything on a beautiful horse/He went and lost the race of course/there was nobody with me at the finish line“), withdrawing from life and numbing the memories and emotional scars with a bottle that pours one of the album’s catchiest choruses with “she drinks to remember drinks to forget/drinks to forgive and she drinks to regret…trying to fill the hole in her heart“.
Proving she can swagger with the best, James Stephen on fiddle, Main Street sets the bass to throb and guitar to gunslinger for a swipe at the way corporate commerce and its “sweatshop slaves” has seen the mom and pop stores disappear from America’s shopping landscape “while the rich get richer cause their money’s off shore” and “a homeless woman sleeps just outside the front door“.
She closes on two softer notes. First up is the nostalgia-themed reflection of more innocent wild and free days when “the world was new” and “we believed the lies we told” when we “we weren’t afraid to fly/crash and burn live or die/always walking on a wire/over heartache and desire” in the gradually building march beat of guitar chiming The Wilderness. Finally, introduced with and accompanied by string quartet, the tremulous guitar-backed Because We Love is a simple meditation on the emotion that, with all its joy and pain, its permanence and at times transitory nature (“it’s so hard to find and too easy to lose/so quick to wound so tough to hold on to”), makes us the most human. This is her fifteenth album (seventeenth if you include collaborations with Hanson and Keith Glass) and while all of those previous releases have been outstanding, this is in another league entirely, unquestionably one of the finest albums of the year and her personal Sirius. Follow those stars.