“I quit the idea of me,” sings Casey Dienel in the first line of “People Can Change,” the first song on The Heart Is an Outlaw, Casey Dienel’s first album in eight years. Over a jazzy backdrop, they shed their skin: “I quit the ideal of me, too/Wipe the slate clean/Gimme a moment to rinse off and pull through.” Halfway through the 2020s, with social media oversharing finally established as our favorite pastime, the act of dipping out and returning as a newer, better version of yourself is so well worn it risks banality. In a recent, widely re-posted New Yorker review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s bonkers new memoir All The Way to the River, Jia Tolentino pointed out the tedium of the “amnesiac perpetual becoming” that results from “regular self-narration at mass scale.” How to breathe new life into reinvention? Outlaw declares touching grass isn’t good enough—you must dig till you touch dirt.
The claustrophobic, isolated frenzy of Imitation has been replaced here by lightness and ease, expansion, and elbow room. To steal a phrase from internet radio host Jake Longstreth, Dienel paints with “the tasteful palette of the 1970s,” collaborating with producer Adam Schatz (who plays sax in Japanese Breakfast and just contributed to Neko Case’s Neon Gray Midnight Green) plus a generous roster of session musicians to conjure visions of Carole King and Phoebe Snow through lots of thoughtful piano, judicious horns, and indulgent layers of vocal harmonies.
Ears fatigued by undernourished bedroom pop will feast on the arrangements here, which, in this economy, sound deliciously expensive—or, to be a little less crudely capitalistic, valuable. Dienel makes several lyrical references to gardening, often in a way that suggests struggle—they dig in inhospitable soil (“I built…that shitty little garden there/Loved it so hard though nothing came up”) and name-check flowering plants that do battle with heavy snowfall—but the lushness of the soft-rock sound suggests abundance, an extremely fruitful harvest indeed.
And though they have a smoky voice that suits the more languid tracks, like the honeyed waltz of “3 of Cups” or the gleefully adulterous blues rock of “Your Girl’s Upstairs” (“Don’t be mad/Your girl was with me again”), Dienel really comes alive when the tempo gets cranked. “Seventeen”’s crisp disco drums invite a Fleetwood Mac-style twirl or two on the dancefloor, and standout single “The Butcher Is My Friend,” a song “about limerence in inhospitable terrain,” takes a simple synth line and hustles it toward arena-rock ecstasy. There’s plenty of amusement in the pastoral, but Dienel knows that sometimes you have to kick yourself out of the garden, fill the car with fossil fuel, and put the pedal to the metal.
Getting back to the crucial quality of self-awareness—Dienel isn’t spinning a smug, closed-loop narrative of reinvention here. They are comfortable, even jubilant, in the middle of transformation: from stranger to lover, lover to friend, rule-abider to “outlaw.” Change is a word heard over and over: “Don’t be surprised if I change my mind,” they declare on “People Can Change”; “What is love but a prayer to be changed?” they ask on “I’m So Glad You Came.” All this talk of transformation could come across as flighty or unserious if Dienel didn’t consistently ground the sentiment in sensuous, worldly pleasure: the sting of a strong drink, the scent of a blooming flower, the weight of someone else’s body. It’s hard to overthink things, Dienel suggests, if you focus on feeling them instead. And so closing track “Tough Thing” lights the album’s long fuse, binding sense and sensibility in a nervy nine-minute rush: “Keep on turning, turning, turning me/Keep on turning, turning, turning me on.” Outlaw lovingly presents transformation not as a to-do list to check off and discard, but a sensation to indulge in as long as possible.
