Courtney Marie Andrews - On My Page (2013) [FLAC]

this is the real deal beautifully written, hauntingly sung, masterfully played, idiosyncratic folk music and it has dropped pretty much without a ripple.
On My Page, is, if anything even better than Andrews live performance, the songs still clean and unfussed-over but given resonance by skeletal arrangements electric guitar, bass, drums, vocal harmonies. This Time swells here with piano and pedal steel, a country dance orchestra swaying behind Andrew s crystalline vocals, the warm, sure defiance of her chorus, I ain t going back, this time fleshed out with subtle harmonies. This is the best song on the album, and one of the most densely imagined. But Woman of Many Colors, is nearly as good, pared back to the essentials of song and picking.
Andrews has a clear, emotively potent voice, a little husky in the mid-range, but shockingly pure at the top. When she clambers easily up an octave jump, building volume as she hits the icy high, she ll evoke Judy Collins. When she mutters bluesily in the verse, you ll think instead of Karen Dalton. She and I and Joni Mitchell share a Scorpio birthday, and maybe this is the best reference, that balance of warmth and chill, emotional release and personal reserve.
When it s a woman artist, we always focus on the voice, but Andrews is also a skilled and imaginative guitar player, capable equally of country waltzes and American primitive-style cascades of picking. Moreover, she s got the songwriters knack of writing melodies that seem familiar, even the first time you hear them, but that you never can exactly place.
I m going to go out on a limb here and say that On My Page is a stone-cold classic in country folk. It s the kind of album that, if released in the 1970s, might have moldered in Good Will bins for a couple of decades before Light in the Attic or Drag City declared it significant. Well, let s not drag it out. Andrews might be our Vashti Bunyan or Linda Perhacs. Why not let her skip the decades of obscurity part?