The American pop psychoanalyst Thomas Moore wrote that each of us have three selves: the Eternal Self, who arrives at birth and never changes; the Practical Self, who is shaped by events and experiences; and the Unfolding Self, who is yet to be. On her third album, Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Heather Woods Broderick is most concerned with this third self. Having found Moore’s ideas recorded in her mother’s diaries, Broderick inspirits her third album, Invitation, with his belief that one must reject passivity and persistently choose to accept life’s invitation. Though it is unstinting in its beauty, at times the album feels like Broderick was too lethargic to RSVP.
Having spent the majority of her musical career as a backing singer for the likes of Sharon Van Etten and Alela Diane, as well as playing with Horse Feathers and Efterklang, Broderick’s first challenge is to stand apart from her own backdrop. She shares in the concern that her voice is all too easily subsumed by her scenery, and often, it’s a deliberate kind of defeat. “I take it my words are getting lost rolling over my tongue,” she sings on “Nightcrawler.” “I Try” makes her efforts plain: She wants to keep her unfolding self alive not by being “the motionless body of the honeybee, but to have the stinger in me.”
Growing up alongside brother Peter (himself a prolific member of the Portland indie-folk scene) amid the disparate sounds of the Maine countryside—nightjaws cawing, pine trees tossing in the wind—Broderick’s early sense of song was inextricably tied to her natural surroundings. Three albums in, she still sounds as though she’s composing music en plein air. Where 2015’s Glider carved canyonscapes of echoey electric guitar, Invitation recreates the landscape of the Oregon coast. Strings create the album’s wind, while Broderick’s piano arpeggios sound like waves redistributing pebbles and her airy backing vocals engender a sense of three-dimensional space. It’s a kind of musical landscaping not entirely dissimilar to that of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who once compared himself to a gardener: “Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern, and texture.”
Broderick’s landscape is imputed with feeling, which she recalls with geographical specificity on “Nightcrawler”: “It all takes me back to when I was in a moment of love/Thirteen miles outside Athenry, on the way to my brother’s house.” Each track is augmented with naturalistic details, whether the ricocheting percussion that marks footsteps on “A Stilling Wind” or the orchestra of crickets ushering day into twilight on “Daydream,” but Broderick’s quiet subjectivity hardly imposes itself. Her voice sounds shaky and uncertain on opener “A Stilling Wind” as she feels her “feet swinging in the atmosphere,” and on the string-heavy “Quicksand,” overpowering instrumentation swallows her up completely.
As a songwriter, Broderick thrives in the abstract rather than the pictorial and representational. Her recollections dither between specific and poetic, but her lines seldom seem to cut through. Much of the imagery she ekes from the landscape turns to cliché; a gull “with broken wings/Fever and dreaming of flying away” on “Quicksand”; “fleeting as sun-dappled water” on “My Sunny One.” “White Tail” might be the album’s best song, as Broderick’s elongated vocals take up welcome space at its center. “To remain, in a swollen sphere of all things,” she sings, striking a sumptuous presence over gently brushed drums. Then, in a moment of vitality, she strikes her piano keys in quick repetition; set against the sounds of slide guitar and crickets at dusk, the song sounds almost as deliriously romantic as Yo La Tengo’s instrumental “Green Arrow.”
In turning to pop psychology and her mother’s old journals, Broderick makes it clear she was looking for answers. Sometimes it feels like a futile effort. Despite Invitation’s cinematic and often successful composition, Broderick succumbs to the passivity she’s supposedly working to renounce. The songs are ambient rather than immediate, more decorative than they are distinct. The title track comes as an exception, as Broderick cries out “I accept” in a voice that feels pained, present, unfolding. The rest of Invitation seldom finds equal vigor.
