Mia Doi Todd has an uncanny gift for music that glides and ascends and lands smoothly, always somewhere unexpected. Over the past two decades, this quality has made the Los Angeles native a favored collaborator for a wide range of artists looking to explode the boundaries of their music—from Dntel to Laraaji to Saul Williams—and it makes her an equally compelling artist when working alone. She is a singer-songwriter who views her work more like a landscape painter, patiently bringing a world to life across the canvas.
The lush and meditative Music Life marks Todd’s first collection of original songs in a decade, following a film score and two sets of covers: 2014’s Floresta, which featured interpretations of Brazilian music, and 2016’s Songbook, which took on influences like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Elliott Smith. Both albums highlighted Todd’s signature qualities—a spectral, swooning sense of melody, her light and easygoing soprano—while showing how adept she is at working outside her comfort zone.
Music Life furthers this exploration while offering an inviting survey of her strengths as a songwriter. Several tracks are tender reflections on family and motherhood, like the lullaby “Wainiha Valley,” featuring zither accompaniment from Laraaji. Others tell more imagistic stories, like the lilting, mermaid fable of “My Fisherman.” While she accesses a wide range of characters and genres through these songs, Todd unifies the material with an instinctive sense of uplift and connectedness (“I think my worldview is full of pink glasses,” she told NPR last year), and her writing reveals this outlook with the plainspoken directness of aphorisms.
Todd contrasts the lucidity of her words with her complex, hypnotic arrangements. In “Take Me to the Mountain,” she describes a kind of vision quest while the music—featuring saxophone from Sam Gendel amid layers of violin and viola, clarinet and flute—conjures a similar journey, trudging then surging uphill. At the end of each verse, Todd plays a subtle trick with her phrasing, repeating the last syllables of a line: “Let’s go someplace where we can breathe/Where we can breathe/Where we can breathe.” Stretching the words into new shapes, her voice becomes part of the tapestry of instruments, her lyrics evoking a texture and rhythm all their own.
The merging of music and meaning also lies at the center of the title track, one of Todd’s most magical performances to date. Accompanied by guitarist Jeff Parker and keyboardist Money Mark, she leads a jam session that mirrors the increasingly dark turn of her lyrics. “If you give your life to music,” she sings, “It might not go quite like you thought.” It’s a simple premise, but as the mood shifts from excitement to exhaustion, hotels to hospital rooms, the music grows uncharacteristically urgent and intense. When she comes back down to earth in the closing lines, a gentle repetition of “I loved you” and “I love you,” the preceding images linger like a vivid dream.
The best songs on Music Life evolve with this subtle, intuitive sense of escalation. Take, for example, the centerpiece “Little Bird.” It’s the kind of thing another songwriter might fashion into a breezy interlude, a breather amid the heavier material. Duetting on nylon string guitar with Brazilian musician Fabiano do Nascimento, Todd sings a sweet, sad melody for someone who has never left L.A. and could use a little perspective. But as she starts making her case, her ideas begin to snowball: “Bali or Bangkok/Denver or Dallas/Maybe Atlanta... or Atlantis.” Soon, we are nearing the eight-minute mark, and she just seems to be ramping up. It’s a pleasant reminder that we are on Mia Doi Todd Time, only visitors, and the world has never seemed bigger or more full of possibility.
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