Second Negative

Jolie Holland

I stumbled upon an article about Jolie Holland and her new cd about a week ago. The review sounded promising enough: girl born and raised in Texas, lives in San Francisco, music a combination of folk, jazz, blues, country, etc. Outside of the San Francisco part, she sounded like plenty of local artists.

I’m a big fan of the whole singer/songwriter genre. Is that a genre? Anyway, I like music without the studio sheen. I also like singers with an accent, Texas if I can get it. I’m thinking about lobbying Congress to make losing your accent on purpose a crime against nature.

So, I stopped by Jolie’s website and listened to a couple of songs from her first album, mostly demo tracks not originally meant for release. I was blown away. The songs were unbelievably good. I found a couple of mp3s she is offering from the new album on another site. They were also wonderful and different.

It was all too much, so I bought the album. A little side note here, when I go to the record store, I like to look around for something. The girlfriend wants me to ask for it. She recommends that I ask at least 14 times during the first few minutes I’m looking. I don’t have a problem looking. I don’t have a problem asking. I will ask if it comes to that. But see, I LIKE looking for something. I want to discover it for myself.

Uh yeah, anyway…I’ve been listening to the album for a week now, and I’m just amazed at how good it is. It gets better every time it cycles back to the first track and starts over. She has a strange way of enunciating some words that isn’t displayed on every song. I think some people might not like that (boomers), but it’s very interesting.

I don’t even know how to describe her music. The reviews about it being country, jazz, folk, etc. were all correct, but it’s something more than that. I don’t know what. I’m pretty sure that track 10, “Damn Shame” is about how she performed at SXSW in March and I missed it. It won’t happen again.