![]() As Bulat tells Apple Music, Good Advice was about “going through a breakup-you go out with your friends and have a dance party, and we just happened to record our dance party.” By contrast, Are You in Love? finds the Montreal singer-songwriter in the throes of new romance (she married bandmate Andrew Woods in 2019), but also grappling with the death of her father. But the philosophies underpinning each record are dramatically different. It also strikes a similarly luminous balance between ’60s girl-group classicism and experimental, synth-tweaked futurism. Her investment in these songs is so precise that we’re left to surmise that, had she even for a moment strayed from her yearning or ceased to understand the flawed humanity within her, this album could never have been conceived.Like its 2016 predecessor Good Advice, Basia Bulat’s Are You in Love? was produced by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. Her emotions, so concisely conveyed, link craft and history. Here, it’s as easy to imagine her as a casualty of the diaspora looking across the Atlantic as it is to see her alone in a Toronto apartment watching the traffic roll past. The line “There’s no one who will take me by that shore/ Close to the smoke, far from the fire of your harbor” feels centuries old as she utters it. ![]() “The Shore,” with its metronomic hammered dulcimer melody, best articulates this fragile beauty that Bulat conjures. With Bulat’s focus on the love she feels - whether it be for her family or her wayward companions and friends - these songs become vitally linked to personal heritage. Still, as diverse as Heart of My Own is, ‘folk music’ remains at its core. And on “Once More, For the Dollhouse,” Bulat sounds like a honky-tonk chanteuse (read: Neko Case). “If Only You” and “Walk You Down” are up-tempo, rollicking songs that run contrary to the regret and uncertainty looming in the lyrics. Strings and brass inject emotion into many of the album’s otherwise pensive and desolate acoustic numbers. “Run” and “Heart of My Own” are more solemn affairs that find Bulat ruminating over her coarsely strummed autoharp. Opener “Go On” begins with dusty acoustic guitar chords that break down into a Celtic-flavored reel. ![]() Though Bulat presents them uniquely, strains of English and Celtic folk, country, chamber, and Tin Pan Alley pop are woven throughout. On “Sugar and Spice,” she laments, “Oh, I’ve done myself in.” Offering herself no consolation, she later reasons in her soaring, warbling alto, “I looked for the road/ But all I could see was the dust.” Elsewhere, “If Only You” plays jubilant horns against the futile choral plea, “If only you, you, you would take me back.” Such notions frame every song on the album and complete a portrait of Bulat that’s endearing and disarming in its uninhibited passion.Įxpertly and diversely arranged, the songs of Heart of My Own build and hover, often in surprising ways. This album in its sparse and lush beauty is the description of a heart, one filled with yearning and vulnerability. ![]() Both on her spotty but endearing debut Oh, My Darling and on this year’s heart-wrenching tour de force Heart of My Own, Bulat weaves personal confession with strains of heritage and tradition.ĭifferentiating herself from Joanna Newsom, the contemporary artist most readily analogous to Bulat, she conveys both musical and narrative themes in contrastingly straightforward ways. Ontario-based singer/songwriter Basia Bulat, however - with her tendency for traditional, ethereal instrumentation and wrought introspection - treads comfortably between the two camps. In the indie music world, nearly all ‘folk’ artists fall into this latter category, with their generation-defining futuristic scope and DIY-D (do it yourself - digitally) attitude toward recording. For others, it’s merely a style focused solely on the aforementioned sound, but meandering in its narrative. For some, it’s the revelation of social, political, or cultural phenomena through simple and overwhelmingly acoustic musical and lyrical forms. ‘Folk music’ means different things to different people. ![]()
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