A plainspoken mysticism rules heaven and earth on Shannon Lay’s remarkable Living Water, a quiet, mostly acoustic album that is bigger and stranger than its hushed dynamics and finger-picked sparkle might suggest. Crack open the Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s unassuming lyrics and you’ll find pearls of unconventional folk wisdom scattered throughout. “All it is,” she sings on “Orange Tree,” an early highlight, “is simple small and true/You and all connected at the root.” In “Caterpillar,” she contemplates the oceanic dimensions of a life force that “either creates destroys or delivers.” She has a tendency, when grappling with the Big Questions, to follow her train of thought to a place where sung or spoken meter can’t quite keep up (“Life is like the sea/Ever changing in itself and in all of its surroundings”), but what might look chaotic on the page flows as naturally as water when she sings. The sweetness of her voice, with its faint vibrato, along with a trace of placeless accent the Redondo Beach native might have picked up from listening to folk singers from across the Atlantic, smooths her words as they tumble out. She’s best when she goes straight to the small, bright truth of things: “We ask the sky when the answers are right below our feet”; “Life is confusing and we are asleep.”
Lay’s sound is not a novel proposition. You can hear affinities with a number of acoustically tinged projects of recent years—Julie Byrne, Big Thief, the Angel Olsen of Half Way Home, as well as a wide range of canonical singer-songwriters: Elliott Smith, Karen Dalton, Nico, Nick Drake. Lay also plays in a garage-punk band, Feels, but there are no echoes of their fuzzy ferocity here. Solo, she sings soft, often melancholy songs accompanied by her own acoustic guitar; a few songs on Living Water feature violin and cello, and there are hints of standup bass in the mix. But her captivating music is distinctive in ways that are hard to put your finger on.
The album was recorded by the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly, who also worked on Half Way Home. And instead of the watery reverb of Lay’s debut, All this life goin down, or the close confines of her demo collection, Holy Heartache, he has opted for stark, wide-open atmospheres aching with empty space. (Though Lay’s official debut came out earlier this year, this feels like her de facto introduction to the world, thanks in part to the efforts of Kevin Morby, who is releasing the album on his new Mare imprint, a sub-label of Woodsist.) With few bells or whistles and little studio trickery, the recording puts a primacy on her unusual songwriting and her quietly commanding voice.
The haunting opener “Home” offers a good glimpse of what makes Lay’s music special. A thin stripe of violin sets the scene; chiming open fifths move in parallel against a steady, finger-picked ostinato. That repetition, combined with unexpected shifts between minor and major, has a way of bedeviling the usual verse/chorus structures. (She has a knack for forms that leave you feeling slightly off balance without quite knowing why: Another song, “Orange Tree,” is in 6/8 time but is structured in 10-bar phrases.) “Home” is about feeling lost and trapped, yet her chord progressions move as unfettered as weather. She’s not a powerfully melodic singer; she tends to mull over the same notes, alternating high, clear tones with careful melisma. But she is expressive in her dynamics, sliding from forceful to hesitant within the space of a few lines, and the zip of her fingers against the strings accentuates the faintly breathy edge of her voice. It’s a strong choice for an opening statement. It’s unsettling; it leaves you slightly on edge.
She has more dulcet modes. “Always Room” could almost be a children’s lullaby, though its whimsical opening refrain—”There’s always room for a little more/And there’s always reason for a little less”—might puzzle even adult ears; I hear it as a kind of bargain struck between frivolity and frugality, pleasure and sense. “The Moons Detriment” is bright-eyed and hopeful, a song about a love that surges “Like an eager new river channel”; “The Search for Gold,” another near-lullaby, promises rebirth “in the grass of a warm summer night.” The image is so sweet, it’s easy to miss the way the next line (“Good and evil through and through”) falls like a shadow over her moonlit reverie.
Those shadows are never far from even her most tranquil songs. The nostalgic “Asa” cradles the hope that our best days are not behind us; the dirge-like “Coast” is as turbulent as the conflicted emotions that shape its churning drums and electric feedback. When she wants to, she can be straight-up heartbreaking. On “Recording 15,” she addresses a loved one who is far away—estranged, abroad, maybe dead. “I don’t know what’s real anymore,” she pleads, and then she strikes a nerve so raw, it chills: “I have lived without your touch/For so long that it fades from my memory/I’m so hungry for your touch.” An unflinching portrait of loneliness and desire, it is the most direct of all Living Water’s songs, and also the album’s most unsparing emotional gut-punch.
It’s a testament to her restraint that even here, bittersweet never turns maudlin or morose. And maybe it’s a testament to her spirit, too: Living Water is shot through with a kind of ragged hope—not optimism, exactly, but a determined belief in the power of that life force to pull us all toward something like transcendence. It’s there in “Orange Tree,” in the image of the singer finding answers right beneath her feet; it’s there in the title track, an almost animistic snapshot of the Southwestern landscape, where “living water” brings both destruction and salvation. And it’s there in the staggeringly beautiful country blues of “Come Together”: “There’s so much pain dwelling within us all/Don’t go spreading yours around/Oh lord knows/We all have enough,” she sings, in what is one of the record’s truest and most resonant lines.
Then a startling thing happens. An electric counterpoint explodes into the frame and her voice fractures into joyous multi-part harmony: “Come on, shake your broken shoulders/Come on, move your broken shoes.” A life-affirming celebration of the wounds we all wear, it perfectly exemplifies Living Water’s seductively deceptive form. Like a late-summer sky the color of robin’s eggs, the album’s outward simplicity masks the vastness of what lies behind.
