Jaimee Harris
Boomerang Town
Folk N’ Roll Records / Thirty Tigers
17 February 2023
Jaimee Harris’s 2020 Red Rescue was an auspicious debut, but Boomerang Town is a far stronger, more reflective, more emotional and masterful album that firmly announces her as both a voice and a writer of the finest grade.
Texas-born, in a small town near Waco, Jamiee Harris recently turned 30, a milestone that caused her to reflect on her path so far, in particular on how her hometown, her raising and family roots have shaped who she is. It’s a family background marked by her paternal grandfather’s suicide, suicide ideation and addiction, she herself in recovery, and death and loss loom large in her song-cycle as she explores the fragile ties that bind to a backdrop of the shifting and often troubling nature of America’s current political and social landscape as well as re-evaluating her connection to faith.
It opens with the stunning seven-minute title track Boomerang Town, echoes of early Janis Ian and Mary Chapin Carpenter informing the strummed acoustic arrangement and the narrative as it charts the fortunes of its central small-town characters, the Boy and Julie, a cocktail of herself, her family and those she knew growing up, capturing dashed dreams and hope on hold as, echoing Springsteen’s The River, she sings “I was working at the supermart, when I fell for Julie, knocked her up/Like everybody said I would/The day I turned sixteen I got that job, I couldn’t wait to buy a car, save enough/Leave this town for good/In August I asked Julie if she’d run away, she said she wanted to wait ‘til May to graduate/She’d be the first in her family, so I stayed behind/Thought she could get a scholarship to college, become a nurse, travel the world/But all that took a backseat when we saw those double lines”. Lines like “After her shift she lights a smoke up on the bridge, under the billboard painted “Jesus Lives”/Julie steps over the rail, thinks about salvation/The sun arrives and collides with the steeple, casts a shadow over God’s most desperate people/Julie takes it as a sign, lets go, and starts flyin’” bear the mark of an accomplished storyteller.
Mark Hallman on bass, piano and harmonica and Brian Standefer on cello, again conjuring confessional Ian, the dark-veined Sam’s traces a circular melody line designed to capture the spiral of addiction and mental illness, the title referring to Sam’s Town Point, a South Austin dive bar frequented by songwriters and where she hung out far too often when she was drinking heavily.
Another lengthy track, the quaveringly sung, piano accompanied How Could You Be Gone is a co-write with her partner Mary Gauthier and appeared on her recent Dark Enough To See The Stars, a song steeped in the experience of grief and the difficulty in accepting the reality of the loss (“I walk by your photograph, I hear your voice, I hear your laugh/Everybody’s dressed in black, I still think you’re coming back”) written following the death of both a close mutual friend during the pandemic and her mentor Jimmy LaFave in 2017, the building intensity of the music mirroring the emotions.
That features David Mansfield, and fellow violinist Michele Gazich brings her own spark of brilliance alongside Dirk Powell’s accordion to the Irish-tinged walking rhythm The Fair and Dark Haired Lad, a workshop co-write with Powell and Katrine Noel that, using metaphorical imagery, explores the insidious and seductive nature of alcoholism and how it can pass down through generations (“Had my first drink before I could drive/Mama left it on the counter half-full one night/Felt the fire in my chest, shook the hand/Of the fair and dark haired lad/He crept through the boards, hid behind the door/Now he ain’t got a reason to hide no more/Took the seat at the table that my daddy once had”). You can hear Gauthier’s influence here, and the song can unquestionably stand shoulder to shoulder with her best.
Mansfield returns for On the Surface, another with workshop origins, this one run by Gauthier, Eliza Gilkyson, and Gretchen Peters, the task being to respond to the Emma Lazraus poem written on the Statue of Liberty, the song that emerged exploring the contradictions felt in how fellow Christians would condemn her for being queer while Christ’s teaching were to love on another as she pointedly sings “The only reason I am here is ‘cause to us all he made it clear/He’d like for me to sit here at your table/For other guests you poured the wine, you got to me in your sweet time/When you finally found me fit and able/If he were here he’d pour my drink, set it down before he’d even think to take a sip to cure his own thirst/To sit here with your smiles fake or stand outside with swallowed hate, well I have not decided which is worse”, hypocrisy succinctly summed in how “It’s so easy to love your brother on the surface” and that “love is not reserved just for our own kind/It travels over many shores, through rivers, canyons, prison doors/And I believe it travels all the time”.
Specifically written to include an accordion solo after seeing Flaco Jimenez in action (here courtesy of Mark Hallman), the fingerpicked Good Morning, My Love is a song about relationship anxieties (“Do you wish that I was near/To tame your racing mind/Or, am I the cause of all your worry/Do you hunger now for freedom/Does your silence mean you’re leaving/This love of ours behind”).
Initially recorded as a bonus track for her The Congress House Sessions EP, opening with the evocative line “Tonight the moon is colored like old smokers’ teeth”, another song of leaving and loss, Like You became the spur to write the new album and was inspired by travelling through the landscape of Texas, from the home of The Whitmore Sisters through to Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah and back to Austin with Townes Van Zandt as the spiritual musical guide.
It’s followed by the album’s most heartwrenching number, Fall (Devin’s Song), a Gauthier co-write about Devin Lujan, a classmate who was accidentally shot and killed by his best friend when they were in sixth grade, the song inspired by the In Memoriam pieces his mother had written to the local paper, most specifically the one to him on what should have been his graduation day (“Your friends are in the auditorium/You should be with them in your cap and gown/We should be packing you up for college/‘Cause you had big dreams, far bigger than this town”).
After that, a little light and hope is needed, ably supplied by Love Is Gonna Come Again, a simple strummed acoustic guitar and piano track penned with regular collaborator Graham Weber, as an encouragement to those among her musical community and family who had suffered loss in 2016, acknowledging the pain of grief but also the hope that, as the opening line says, “Love is gonna come again, maybe when you’re not quite looking/Maybe tonight, my friend/Maybe when you’re driving love will call and you will fall into a place you never thought you could fit in”.
She ends with the funky groove of Missing Someone, Andre Moran on slide, a song borne out of how the first four months of her relationship with Gauthier were spent long distance (“Ain’t never been so hard living, hard living this way/When I finally get to getting to you, babe, I’m gonna stay”) and they would send each other love songs. Harris’s 2020 Red Rescue was an auspicious debut, but this is a far stronger, more reflective, more emotional and masterful album that firmly announces her as both a voice and a writer of the finest grade.