Recently a friend texted the group chat to say she was sick of opening her phone to see faces: all those to-camera bits instructing you on how to better live your life, trading on our currency of individualized certainty. Uncertainty feels like a rare commodity—the willingness to say “I don’t know,” or to unpick your own attitudes when it would be a lot easier to double down and build a brand on defiance.
The magnetic new Flock of Dimes record makes an offering of that sentiment, coming out of a rewarding nudge that prompted Jenn Wasner to question her own narrative. On The Life You Save, the Baltimore-born musician examines the role she had taken within a family dealing with addiction and mental health issues: She was the savior, always ready to jump in with the perfect solution. The shifting light prompted her to consider the ego inherent in being a helper, what it cost her, and what it potentially put on others. “Now I’m trying to tell you how to be/Afraid that what you do to you/You’ll do to me,” she sings on “Theo,” a gut punch wrapped in a warm swoop of vocal harmonies and pedal steel. Her formative feelings were so reasonable, so understandable, that it makes the weight of her newfound humility hit that much harder.
As a guitarist in Wye Oak and part of the Bon Iver band, among other ceaseless collaborations, Wasner is known for an electric style that corrodes as it crests, creating an arcing impression akin to the billions of fragments that make up Saturn’s rings. She makes catharsis physical: “One More Hour,” from 2021’s Head of Roses, cracks open in a way that makes me feel like my breastbone has snapped and the cosmos is spilling out of my chest. Her third album as Flock of Dimes all but forgoes that drama, dwelling in limpid, light-dappled acoustic and folktronic arrangements guided by her powerful vocal melodies. It’s a bold choice for a player as immediately distinctive as Wasner, but one that feels fitting for a project about setting aside familiar scripts. You get the sense she wants you to listen differently as she delivers these nuanced takes on need.
Listening to The Life You Save feels safe, not in the sense of risk-aversion, but in the way Wasner creates a tender space in which to dismantle what had seemed so sure, to see without judgment all the ways you might have been kidding yourself all along. Her soft yet rich voice is innately consoling, empathetic. Often the simplicity of these songs make them feel like incantations, her sentiments strengthening over the course of a track, as with “Afraid,” about how life robs our innocence; or like deeply humane sermons, such as “Keep Me in the Dark,” about the various futile ways we can try to resist love, which succumbs to a beautiful flowing stream of a chorus. As “The Enemy” countenances the “violence upon violence” of conflicting perceptions imposing upon one another, the vocal reverb and expectant, repeating acoustic figures suggest genuine anticipation for what might lie beyond those assumptions; one of the record’s rare squalling guitar solos desecrates them joyfully.
When Wasner considers how potentially unproductive it may sometimes have been to help others, it’s never in the trite self-serving sense of selfishness masquerading as boundaries or putting your own oxygen mask on first. There is a moonlit peace to “Instead of Calling,” even as she frets about abandoning her role in triage. The calm, repeating chorus of “Not Yet Free” suggests sitting with pain rather than trying to work past it. She saves her harshest words for her former coping mechanisms, but still beds the revelations in gently. “I can go on but I’m not proud of it,” she sings on the lovely firefly glimmer of “Close to Home,” shrugging off her former delusions. “It’s pride that will not let me break,” she sings on “Pride,” where a frazzled guitar part imperceptibly softens to pedal steel, an affecting shift in emotional weather. For anyone who has struggled to let themselves off the hook, who always holds tight amid a state of collapse, she offers a glimpse of what it might be like to relinquish the tension.
The album’s two sparest moments stand in pointed contrast. The straightforward and unadorned “Long After Midnight” follows a gorgeous cascading guitar motif as Wasner sings about giving everything she’s got to help, the structure of the song tidy and resolute. But the live-tracked, largely acoustic closing song “I Think I’m God” reckons with the fear inherent in trying to account for every eventuality, another simple affair that takes on an unruly scale as Wasner sings the title over and over in a wrenched voice. Stripping it all back, she leaves nowhere to hide, relinquishing her self-protective grip on control on a gentle-sounding record that is anything but.
