I’ve held off reviewing Maria Taylor’s Something About Knowing for around a month because:
1. I liked it too much, I wanted it to wear off me.
2. I wanted to be in the right mood to review it.
Well, it has worn off a little and I am in a lousy mood, just perfect for sneering at the Saddlecreek singer songwriter who found a deepening of her own bruised melodic heart with the healing power of true love and family.
Hardly typical rock and roll fare so after being won over for a couple of weeks, I gave it a rest and came back and this is a very strong album regardless of subject matter. The album opens astoundingly and follows it up very well, just past the midway point is the album best moment, the title track, and it ends with the first song Maria Taylor wrote for the album.
Between those songs, there isn’t much of a weak track though the songs seem to intrude on the reverie. “Tunnel Vision” has a hook so great, Taylor opened the song with it, and between is pop rock: it’s killer but I don’t really wanna hear it right now. “Tunnel Vision” doesn’t seem to fit in right where it is. I think it is like… wait, let me do my job a bit here and then I’ll explain it. Maria began her career with a band signed to Geffen before forming another band Azure Ray and signing to Saddlecreek where she became Conor Oberst’s muse as well as embarking on a solo career. She married three years ago and now is the proud owner of a baby boy named Miles.
The album was begun in a cycle of extended sleep deprivation as Maria’s first born kept her up all night and ended in a studio with Mike Mogis as the arrangements came together. The last song, “Lullaby For You,” was the first written, almost by accident, as Maria discovered the tune she was singing to her son to get him to sleep was actually a song in waiting. The first song is another lullaby, a gorgeous benediction.
Around the midway point there are two terrific love songs for her husband, “You’ve Got A Way With The Light” and the title track “Something About Knowing”, it’s like these two songs are going out of their way to make love feel as comforting as possible; love as a way of facing life forward in a secure wonderful sense of wellbeing.
I don’t actually believe in that but if I did it might sound something like this: there is a tender strength to both numbers and they are among my favorites of the year. So along with the two lullabys and the two love songs, are the two fast ones, “Up All Night” and “Tunnel Vision” both of which are borderline dance, with “Tunnel Vision” moving to a relatively invigorating beat, and “Up All Night” the first song called “Up All Night” about being kept up all night by your baby son. So that’s six impeccable songs.
The other four are solid but work as a sort of ambient glow on the main six.
Put them together and you have an album that is so lovely it seems to exist somewhere out of the realms of everyday rock and roll. Life can’t be so good, people can’t write such lovely music, can they?
Grade: A