I Thought It Would Be Easier is Annie Dressner’s fourth studio album. Co-produced with Paul Goodwin, it is very much centred around relationships and kicks off airily sung Black & White with Boo Hewerdine on Farfisa, a post-break-up number, inspired by having bumped into an ex after a decade apart, with all the confused feelings that entailed (“I never was good at goodbyes/I just don’t know how to deal/And the thing that made me the saddest is I wanted to know you…You don’t want me to think of you in such a light that you think I do/But I don’t think that I ever completely stopped loving you”), building to a widescreen emotional climax.
Do You Want To Start A Fight finds itself on the edge of an argument that, while she says, “I hate to break the news but I am not afraid of you”, she doesn’t want to fight now (“‘Cause, I don’t have the energy… I know you think you’re right/But guess what I think I’m right, too”), preferring to “be strangers in the night” and trust it will all calm down (“can’t you just come around/Let’s put an end to this”).
The album title is framed around the idea of being young and naïve (the photos are all of her as a young child) and not knowing how bumpy the road ahead might get, a particularly hard moment being remembered in I Just Realized, which, with its woozy churchy organ and guitar notes like ringing bells intro, deals passing of someone close and the intimations of mortality it prompts on lines like “I just realized, that you were 20 years older when you died…How’s that for a timeline?”, “As I watch my days go by/This year is almost over” and “I hope that I can be just like my mother/And I hope that I can watch my kids get older”. And how hard it can be when the home of old memories is now inhabited by others (“And now they’re in our house/Looking out our windows/And I can’t even walk past the building where we lived”). It’s disarmingly devastating.
“I know you know what you did, you know I know what you did”, she sings on the mandolin-flavoured, rhythmically scurrying Big Grey Couch which, featuring a lead guitar solo, recalls how a great night (“I saw Springsteen play at Madison Square Garden”) turned into a stormy one night stand leaving her wishing “I’d never called you/And gone to that apartment/The one where you were staying/With that big grey couch…We never spoke again…I didn’t even realize/Until I said it aloud/That everything that went down/Was not love” with its suggestions of being sexually taken advantage of and the lingering after-effects (“You made me hate my favorite street/Can’t walk down without it haunting me/Look at the windows of that loft apartment”).
The furniture theme – and cello – continues into the poignant Leather Chair, a gently circling reverb guitar number that seems to link back to her grandmother’s dementia (“I can see you sitting and the colours are changing/Keeping track of seasons through the window frame…And it seems unfair that you’re stuck in that old red leather chair/Picture after picture, you read old letters…I think you know it/I think you’re feeling all alone/I think you sense it/I think you’re smarter than you let on”).
Still unfussily played but musically more upbeat with a driving drum beat and piano, Dance We Do, a set staple for some time now, is about one of these relationships where you know it’s not right for you, but you still love them even while questioning it (“It’s just like you can’t make up your mind about me/It’s just like I can’t make up my mind about you/What are we gonna do?/It’s like, it’s like, it’s like… it’s like a dance we do”).
Polly Paulusma joins her on backing vocals for the even more sprightly 18 Years which again deals with an ambivalent and ultimately disappointing relationship (“you’ll never be who I need you to be/And you’ll never be who I thought you were/And you’ve never once been there me, never really … It took me 18 years to try and get to know you/It took me 18 years to finally trust you/It took hardly anytime at all to feel let down/I feel stupid for even trying, even stupider for crying over you… Tonight I saw what I needed to see/That I’m nothing to you”). Another breezy track, Lofted Houses, then takes her back to New York, thinking of an old friend and remembering “the time when I broke up with that boyfriend And I crashed your parents’ Valentine’s meal/And you saved me in the limo on the East side” and how “we sat on that bench on the Hudson/Talking about when we’d both have children”, the line “How did we get here, sitting in our lofted houses?” encapsulating the album’s theme of moving on from those younger years with their possible futures to arriving at the now when “we’re not as young and we have children”.
Calmly fingerpicked with a folksy hymnal flavour, After The Storm is a lovely song about surviving life’s shipwrecks (“After the storm/I crawled to the shore/And all the world was still/I began to breathe again”, confronting the dark night of the soul and pulling back from the abyss (“I remembered like a dream/My hands upon the rail/The thought of letting go/But something saved me/I almost let myself drown/Yeah, something saved me/From out of the nothingness”), whether that’s faith or music, as it closes with the uplifting “Sing me from the rocks/Sing me from myself/Sing me back to sandcastles by the shore/After the storm/I crawled to the shore/There were colors in the clouds/And I am breathing still”.
Joined by Steven Adams on backing vocals, it ends with the brief punky burst of Should’ve Seen It Coming, with its 20/20 hindsight on a toxic relationship, but despite singing “I’m mostly sad about it/I can’t stop thinking about it/I wish I didn’t care about it/I wish you’d cared about me” there’s an ebullience about it that makes you want to punch the air rather than yourself. As the album amply illustrates, there have been upsets, knockbacks and sadness along the way, but it also captures just how effortlessly Annie Dressner transformed them, rising above the emotional bruises and transforming moments of sadness into moments of musical joy.
I Thought It Would Be Easier is out now (5 April) on Dharma Records Ltd
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