Tradition has it that artists come to Nashville to make it in country music, but Laura Cantrell had to leave her hometown to establish her career. Attending college in New York and fast-tracking toward a bank career, she started DJ'ing a radio show spotlighting local and traditional artists and eventually released two well-received albums for Diesel Only Records (run by her husband Jeremy Tepper). Humming By the Flowered Vine, her third full-length and Matador debut, doesn't stray from that familiar territory: Like its predecessors, it's full of sweetly sung melodies and deceptively simple arrangements of originals and lovingly chosen covers.
Superficially, Cantrell's songs would sound perfectly at home between Allison Krauss and Norah Jones on any playlist, despite the genre differences between them. That's not a damning observation, though: As with Krauss (but less with Jones), below the placid surface of Cantrell's music runs a current of heartbreak that's all the more potent for being so well hidden. It's a hurt inherited from nearly a century of country music tradition, but Cantrell tints it with the patina of personal experience. In other words, she doesn't need to be innovative when she is so expressive.
Produced by JD Foster, Humming By the Flowered Vine is slightly more ambitious and decorous than her first two albums. Cantrell corrals an impressive stable of collaborators, including former Blood Orange Mark Spencer and Tin Hat Trio's Rob Burger. Her touring guitarist Dave Schramm even contributes the relatively baroque original "And Still", which features Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico. But these personalities are well integrated into a larger sound, and the result is a much richer, more nuanced backdrop for Cantrell's voice, enlivening the swing rhythms of "What You Said" and "Wishful Thinking" and lending a spare texture to "Bees" and "Khaki & Corduroy".
Still, Cantrell remains squarely the focus of the album. Recalling contemporaries such as Krauss and Iris Dement-- as well as forebears like Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline at her most restrained-- she still sounds as down-home and unpretentious as ever, with a sophisticated simplicity that's more Big Apple urbane than Music Row countrypolitan. The lead track, a cover of Emily Spray's "14th Street", describes the nervous hope of unrequited love through plainspoken lyrics, but the songs's power comes from the arcing chorus melody and from Cantrell's gentle delivery, which drops into a sing-speak whisper as it expresses her truest desire: "Maybe one step or two/ Then I'd be walking next to you."
Most of the tracks on Humming By the Flowered Vine similarly nurse a kernel of ache. "Khaki & Corduroy" evokes a young Southerner's dislocation in the big city, and the standout "Bees" gracefully conveys end-of-life yearning. "I miss the beach/ I miss the honey/ I miss them humming by the flowered vine," Cantrell sings delicately. "My time is short now/ I feel it coming/ I see you darling in morning light." Instead of grandstanding for maximum tearjerker drama, Cantrell, accompanied by Ted Reichman's elegant piano, emphasizes the track's quiet wistfulness without sounding precious or slight. This understated approach works against her only occasionally, as on the traditional "Poor Ellen Smith". Her voice is entirely too clam to convey the grief and confusion of a wrongly accused man, and the narrative's violence and injustice feel transparent and too close to the surface.
Finally Cantrell does go back to Nashville: Humming By the Flowered Vine closes with the singer wandering the streets of her hometown on "Old Downtown", urged onward by Schramm's frayed guitar. She's struck by the city's complicated and conflicted history-- not Music Row but the monument to WWI hero Sergeant Alvin York. Gradually her civic musings give way to a feeling of personal loss as she realizes that her hometown is no longer her home.
