My Top 18 Albums Of 2013: # 7 Something About Knowing – Maria Taylor
Maria Taylor’s superb meditations on love, marriage and children
Saddlecreek’s Indie Queen Maria Taylor’s Something About Knowing, her ode to marriage and motherhood, appears to be a very settled about, even its title seems set in a certain place, but it isn’t. Far from it. It is an album of exploration, as new as the newborn baby who is so central, new as feeling certain after a lifetime of insecurity.
It gives this simply amazing album a freshness and sharpness so melodic and lovely it is a little easy to underestimate even while the more you listen the more you love it. The lyrics seem to obvious to be poetic but suddenly you’re traveling to unravel “Saturday In June”, a deep album track and you’re caught up in
Let’s go back where the foothills overlook the emerald sea
Where the city lights will sparkle as far as your eyes see
Let’s go back
Let’s go back to the sun
Or you are obsessing over one of the album standouts and humming along and you hear:
Never look down at the holes in the ground
Keep your eyes ahead
Burn like a ray through tomorrow
Today is already in the past
Simple without being simplistic, I bet Conor Oberst flipped away over his protegees’s words: there is a clarity of thought but a consistent use of metaphor to express the deepest of feelings; somewhere here she builds an artistic house of seasons and times passing and love and hope and than she surrounds it with melodic to care for it and take care of it, and as she studies these feelings, and shares them, they have the permanence of true love.
Maria noted how difficult she found it to write about being happy, especially with a newborn baby in the house, but the result is among the best songs in her career, there are not many albums with a run of songs as strong as “Folk Song Melody”, “Up All Night”, “You’ve Got A Way With The Light”, “Something ABout Knowing” and “Lullaby For You”. Not many songwriters include their copy of the Beatles Revolver among everything.
