Sofia Talvik – Paws of A Bear – Unplugged
Makaki Music – Out Now
Released last year, Swedish Americana singer-songwriter Sofia Talvik received deserved acclaim for ‘Paws of a Bear’, her collection of songs about busted relationships, ageing, wildfires and mortality. Back then it came adorned with strings, pedal steel and drums, but she’s subsequently revisited it for this stripped-back rework featuring just voice and guitar, all one take re-recordings that bring an added intimacy to the pervasive melancholia.
Following the original’s running order, it opens with the wistful circling fingerpicked pattern of Take Me Home, the absence of the strings placing the focus firmly on her tenderly bruised vocals. A mediation on standing on your own, again recast in fingerpicked mode, Siren Song is far lighter and less moody here, the lack of echo to the vocals accentuating the purity of her voice. A simple love song, California Snow reveals far folksier colours akin to early Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell while formerly arranged for piano, Reflections now draws out the song’s musing on getting older as she sings “I look in the mirror/And all I can see/Is my mother’s face staring back at me” and how “The dreams I once harboured/Have sailed long ago/Now I’m just fighting on alone“.
Shorn of the muscular, dobro-backed arrangement and sung more straightforwardly, but still sliding up the scales, the title track again talks of regret but acceptance (“If you really wanted you could have broken free/But I guess that freedom was not with me“), before the bright, rippling fingerpicking of Pharaohs And Friends invites you into a world of “stories about the seven seas/Of monsters and of dragons, heroic princesses” in enchanted forests, conjuring thoughts perhaps of Gordon Lightfoot.
Wildfires make their appearance in Blood Moon, reworked from a slow walking, instruments-swirling number into a steadily strummed sway. The flames are a metaphor for a relationship separated by distance, Talvik demonstrating that her vocals can take on deeper, darker shades as well as the softer caresses.
Returning to fingerpicked mode, Wrapped In Paper and the lyrically playful I Liked You Better are perhaps closest to the previous incarnation. The former is another disarming love song as she sings “I couldn’t find a single item for sale that said I love you the most“. The latter balancing the cost to relationships of being a travelling musician with the advantages of “making money singing songs about my old boyfriends“, giving him the finger with the caustic putdown about his new lover that “she can count to ten, but that’s it I bet“.
With the Ralph McTell guitar hints more pronounced in this naked reading, Die Alone carries an even more potent emotional punch in its lyric about her choice to not have children (“I know the clock is ticking and I’m running out of time/But I’m not even sure that I should care/But at least I can admit the question’s there“) and the conclusion that, “in the scheme of things what does it matter, it’s not humanity at stake“.
That was the closing track on the original album, but here there are two new bonus numbers, first up being the shimmering fingerpicked Meanwhile In Winnsboro, a recording of a song she wrote in East Texas just before the lockdown, away on tour and seeing news reports about people hoarding toilet paper and food as she asks “If this really is the end/How will you spend it my friend/Holed up in your house/Till you’re alone in the world?“
She closes with the lovely Broken (Steel Guitars In Heaven), a poignant tribute in memory of her pedal steel player Tim Fleming whom she played the previous track with in an online quarantine performance and who subsequently passed away in April. Talvik also released Broken as a single, recorded with several of Fleming’s colleagues from LA outfit The Wreckers and a chorus of artists that Tim often performed with.
A delightful companion piece and complement to the full studio recording, it’s most definitely one of those bear necessities.
https://music.sofiatalvik.com/album/paws-of-a-bear-unplugged