It's hard to say where Jennifer O'Connor fits into the world. Over the past decade she's tried a few different nooks and crannies: After releasing her debut on her own Kiam Records in 2002 and a second album on Red Panda in 2005, she joined the ranks of Matador Records, who put out her next two LPs. She recorded the first for the new label in the wake of her sister's death from brain cancer; she'd lost another sister to a car accident years before. That record was warm enough, and cool enough, to nearly obscure the heartbreak writhing just under the surface, but there was a certain darkness to the tracks, a foundational uneasiness, that lingered well into even the ostensibly cheerier Here With Me. O'Connor was dropped by Matador within the year of that third collection; her new record I Want What You Want comes on the heels of three years spent working odd jobs and piecing together a life bungled up by recording and touring (and, well, life) and finds her self-releasing through Kiam once more.
The new songs aren't likable so much as largely undislikeable; they seem so unconcerned with anything other than their own gentle resolution that it's hard to fault them for any shortcomings. O'Connor leads each one with her acoustic guitar and her voice, ever steady and sure, and all the other parts are there, solid and familiar-- drums, bass, all marbled with electric guitar. The songs are what they are; they are what they want to be. Each gets its own small, shimmering moment-- an uptick of inflection at the end of a line, a tiny twist of backing harmonies, a particularly satisfying tambourine shake-- which all feel so good and so right that it's tempting to misread her ongoing studies in musical economy and subtlety as lack of ambition and self-satisfaction, just to shame her into something grander.
The circumstances of the lyrics are mostly nonspecific relationship tangles, the stuff a singer less acutely familiar with soul-shaking personal tragedy might thrill in stewing in for 40-plus minutes. But O'Connor's songs are not vehicles of catharsis and exorcism so much as of acceptance, of moving on from events already past-- though perhaps not so far gone that a gentle reminder of how to proceed isn't warranted. "If you make up your mind, you can change your life/ Change your life, change your life," she intones, and it's not the first or last time on the record she's singing to a "you" that might just actually be herself. (The same subject/object conflation may be read into the album's title.)
All the talk of change comes on one of the album's two tracks that forgo the six-string. The other renders the omission more pointed, with O'Connor's opening line-- "You sold your guitar"-- announcing itself steps ahead of a thunked-out electric piano line, recorded so closely, so nakedly, that the slight stickiness of her fingertips against the keys is nearly audible; a wooden bench creaks as she shifts her weight. It's a story-- maybe her own, again, told back to herself--of a singer, a musician, selling an axe, taking a walk, wandering, caught between wondering what's just happened and what's coming next. O'Connor sings of "the means and the ends/ Neither of which you can defend," letting her keys fall silent for a moment at the end of the phrase, leaving room for a tremulous organ to sidle in, bleat shakily, and shuffle away. The song ends soon after, not where it seems like it should but just about where it started: "You sold your guitar/ And walked down the street/ Got on the bus/ And went home to sleep/ And never felt bad/ About being free."
