A lot can change during the fraught time between when a musician finishes recording an album and when it’s released, often months later, per a label’s schedule. For Mirah, everything changed. In the summer of 2018, two weeks before her sixth album, Understanding, came out, the indie rock songwriter lost her beloved father. Four months after that, she gave birth to a son. A year after that, she attempted to resume life as a touring musician, only for the pandemic to nix her plans and intensify her postpartum anxiety.
All this heavy stuff—death, birth, grief, joy, “the whole turn of the earth,” as she sings on “The Beginning of Time”—beats inside the impossibly tender heart of Dedication, Mirah’s first album in seven years, a lifetime of change. It’s a wistful, deeply middle-aged album about deeply middle-aged concerns: motherhood, marital troubles, losing a parent, being grateful for what you have. But its unabashed earnestness is its greatest asset.
A quarter century ago, Mirah cut her teeth singing lo-fi, bedroom-pop bangers full of melodic ingenuity and kinky fantasies. Now, rooted in earthy folk-rock tones and a hint of twang, she writes love songs of a more grown-up, long-haul variety: “Life is already hard enough/And I don’t want to throw away all of the good stuff we have,” she sings on the new wave-tinted “Catch My Breath,” one of several tunes about fighting to keep a strained marriage intact. Another, “The Ballad of the Bride of Frankenstein,” is not a score for the new Maggie Gyllenhaal flick but a stormy love song that uses horror iconography as a metaphor for marital discord. “We are monsters,” Mirah croons, “a perfect pair.” (Thankfully, its ending is more hopeful than the actual Bride of Frankenstein’s.)
She sounds worlds away from the mischievous K Records signee who wrote playfully twisted gems like “100 Knives,” but her candid vulnerability remains constant. It ripples in the bittersweet sorrow of “New Jersey Turnpike,” an aching elegy for Mirah’s father. In spare vignettes—crying on the titular highway, small talk with a guy at the funeral home—she captures the immense disorientation of losing a parent while growing a baby.
Mirah wrote most of these songs in 2024, during a homespun writing residency at a friend’s house in California; she had put writing on pause for years, and now songs seemed to pour out of her. Maybe the time away gave her the distance she needed to write about home. She assesses that distance but redoubles her commitment on “After the Rain,” a warm hug of a song about cherishing family and finding gratitude after loss: “My whole life, I’ve dedicated/To being true to love unfaded,” goes the refrain. It looks like a corny sentiment on the page, but Mirah, accompanied by a backing band that includes Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak) and Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), renders it a moving campfire singalong; swathed in lush harmonies and a pedal steel whine, she strikes the right mix of sorrowful and sweet.
Dedication sifts through the turmoil and joy of Mirah’s life with an intimacy rarely obscured by obliquity or metaphor. Sometimes, though, this immediacy leads to songwriting that’s literal-minded to the point of banality. That’s true of the overstuffed bridge of “Catch My Breath,” when Mirah seems determined to cram a whole voice note’s worth of messages into ungainly couplets like “Now I’m not saying I didn’t contribute/To this shitty, stupid, fucking mess we’ve gotten into.” And “Mama Me,” a gooey-eyed love song to the artist’s baby, is saccharine enough to give you a cavity.
Though Dedication traverses some hard shit, gratitude is the overarching sentiment: gratitude for motherhood, for love, for community, for sheer survival. Even Mirah’s wry pandemic flashback, “Stumbling,” sounds a note of happy relief: “But I’m alive, I didn’t die/And you’re alive, you didn’t diiiie!” On the closing track, her mourning is tempered with the wisdom that grief is, invariably, the flipside of love. Waves of funereal horns linger after the last verse has ended, symbolizing, perhaps, the love that lasts “when life leaves.” That love lasts forever. The song feels like it could, too.
