Amy Trail Goes West
On "Cold Springs," the singer/songwriter explores her roots out west.
For a long time, I've considered Kerry Grombacher the only western - as opposed to "country" - artist in New Orleans. It's a limited genre, one almost defined by Ian Tyson and songs about people whose lives are shaped by a place where there are miles between houses and the horizon is epic. That framework occurred to me listening to Amy Trail's new Cold Springs EP, and the photos on her website made it obvious: Trail with an old Airstream, in a log cabin, in a forest, by a stream in winter shrouded in mist. Not a Ninth Ward landmark or second line scene in the bunch.
The Idaho-born Trail opens the EP with "There Ain't Nothing There," a song about the death of a connection to a place, and she does so with an arrangement that suggests the space between people and communities. She sings with a warm stoicism, one that lets the sense of loss sink in slowly. When she belts out counterpoint lines late in the song, they sound like musical choices more than anxious attempts to make sure no one missed the drama. "Back to the Desert" is a blues stomp that takes a desert not as something to be feared or endured but as an energizing challenge.
Cold Springs is unified by its lyrical concerns, even the seeming outlier, "Evel Knievel." His great failure - to jump the Snake River Canyon - took place in Idaho, but more than that, Knievel in his heyday had a cowboy's poker-faced swagger. Bon Jovi's clubbed the motorcycle = steel horse connection to death, but that doesn't mean he's wrong.
Still, Cold Springs does seem to step away from the Americana musical vocabulary with "Evel Knievel." A swinging shuffle drives the song with rock punctuations, and percolating congas add an internal busyness to "Looking for a New Life (Elizabeth)," a song largely built on occasionally strummed chords that are allowed to hang. Both songs work. Trail's voice is up to the task of carrying the day on "Looking for a New Life (Elizabeth)," but the musical shift blurs the EP's focus at the end of its six-song sequence.
Trail has found musical ground that allows her to address the world she's known, and Cold Springs has a forthright integrity running through it - not as a selling point but as part of her artistic profile. That gives the EP a strong backbone, so even when I don't believe in every musical decision, I believe in her.
Amy Trail plays a CD-release show tonight at 8 p.m. at Chickie Wah Wah.
