Touching on her experience as a queer, black woman in country music, Halfsies is the third album from Lizzie No, a singer-songwriter, harpist and guitarist from Brooklyn. A video game-inspired concept work, Halfsies traces the journey of its central character, Miss Freedomland, from internal and external exile to liberation, pursued through the different levels by what she calls Pac-Man ghosts of white supremacy.
Joined by a host of collaborators, among them members of the Grammy-winning Attaca Quartet and Allison Russell, both of whom appear on the scamperingly picked title track opener, the latter adding clarinet to her vocals. Lizzie No describes the entry point as the experience of remembering a life warped by trauma where “one moment you are in the street level cacophony of ordinary life, and the next moment you are underwater where everything is silent” or, as the lyrics have it “Half full, half empty/I keep mourning friends I never had” where “Even good love is a one-lane road”. She also manages to namecheck Paul Simon, who knew a bit about existential angst.
The opening unaccompanied vocals are treated with a slight reverb a la Laurie Anderson with Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz on harmonies, taking place in an underwater cave, opening into bubbling keyboard notes and scuffed drums, Sleeping In The Next Room is where the character acknowledges she and her relationship are not what they were (“Didn’t notice the canyon yawning in between us”) as she softly coos “you’re sleeping in the next room/I’m falling out of love”.
Lagunita is an ancient Maya city in Mexico, but in the context of the album, the title actually refers to a California brand of IPA beer named for the brewing company founded in Lagunitas in 1993, the song is a sturdy, driving guitar rocker with vocals from Brian Dunne which, in the narrative, relates to how the character spent fifteen years wrestling self-hatred, violent men and alcohol (“I go where I’m wanted, I leave before closing/And I’ve learned to love the sinner and the sin”) but never gave up on the hope of being blessed, or, as she says in the track notes, “If your life has turned into a car wreck, honk the horn until you get free”.
Reining it back into primarily strummed acoustic and pedal steel guitar, the countrified The Heartbreak Store imagines a thrift shop where all the goods are relics of loves gone bad (“Bring your memories; his house keys can’t stay on the ring no more…Remember that bar on the bowery/And making out in the taxi headed home/I’m selling all the pictures that you took of me/Cause it tears me up to see them knowing what i know/If I can’t fall out of love at least I’ll set it down”). It’s the kind of song that Dolly Parton might have written.
With Lizzie No on harp with string quartet accompaniment, Deadbeat plays as a combination of thank-god-i-made-it and thank-god-you’re-here-too (“I’m a wrong turn – sinking feeling – I’m a backup plan/You’re a damn fool – true believer – you take me as I am”) while arranged for acoustic and piano and recorded live, Done is a bittersweet goodbye (“We had a little history/We had a lot of fun/It’s hard to push a tire swing/When you’re sitting on one…Honey we’re through/The leaves changed while I waited/For the right thing to do/Driving through the Catskills I’m not thinking about you”), which, at just under two minutes, proves one of the many highlights.
Marking the halfway point, again with string quartet and Russell on backing, the piano ballad Mourning Dove Waltz was written recovering from Covid and finding that a pair of mourning doves had made their nest on the balcony of her Queens apartment where they hatched two eggs, the chicks eventually flying away as lockdown ended, a fitting image for the song’s account of both rebirth (“Been sober a year now”) and endings (“I lost you for good today/You gave me that look but/I asked you to pack up/And sleep at your own place/Cause sometimes the heartbreak’s/Around the next corner”).
Opening with the lines “It’s hot as hell here at The Annie Oakley/Feel dirt between the sheets/Perforated by the end of a cigarette/There’s nothing on tv/And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Maybe I should get some sleep’… But I’ve got half a bottle left”), starting out simply strummed before the circling drums kick in with the vocals double-tracked, Annie Oakley is a road song set at the motel of the same name in Oakley, Kansas, the sort of place where “little Black girls better move along when the sun goes down”.
The final chapters begin with the jaunty, brushed snares Shield And Sword, another thematic combination, here of breakup and freedom, featuring upright bass and Josh Grange on both pedal steel and mandolin, and about knowing when it’s time to cut your losses (“Let’s be lovers and let’s have fun/We’ll wash ashore when the storm is done/And then we’re gonna lay it down”) and have a mutually beneficial parting (“You can’t get clean when I’m up close/Forget my name, dry out alone”).
Grange again on steel but also baritone guitar and featuring organ, opening woozily and then exploding into a rocking surge, Getaway Car is, as the title suggests, about making that break (“I know you like a long-healed scar/You’re a green light and a getaway car/You keep on saying that you’re waiting for the real thing to call/You beat your head against the wall”) and not spending life “wishing I could be seventeen again”, remembering when “We were only children/Sneaking through the gaps in the fence/Down on Frenchmans” and thinking “About all the great big things/That we could have been”.
It ends with a final string quartet appearance on the bluegrassy gospel Babylon, opening with a lyric reference to The Rivers Of Babylon (“We wept when we remembered the place where we came from”) and marks the album’s most potent commentary on racism, persecution (“There were thieves and killers marching through the middle of the town/We knelt and prayed by the unmarked grave where better men lay down”) and how “To be Black in America is to be a stranger in a strange land”, the mention of Moab referring to the red rocks in the Utah desert rather than anything biblical, although this is nevertheless an exodus from both captivity and self-imposed chains, to step into the boat and cross the river to freedom (“we pressed the gas and we didn’t look back to glance at Babylon…Born on salty water, babies sing new songs/They feel no shame and they feel no pain away from Babylon”). An album that, melodically engaging and lyrically thoughtful, musically sets Lizzie No alongside Rhiannon Giddens and Allison Russell with Toni Morrison as a bedrock, it’s already secured a place in the 2024 Best of list.