Karen Jonas - The Southwest Sky and Other Dreams (2020) [Hi-Res]

Karen Jonas' fifth album The Southwest Sky and Other Dreams is a flashback-fueled fever dream of Americana songcraft and storytelling. Taking the vast desert expanses of the American Southwest as her backdrop, Jonas embroiders small-town snapshots into vivid explorations of our inner struggle between ambition and inaction. The Virginia singer-songwriter's most accomplished and evocative expression to date, The Southwest Sky and Other Dreams captures that aching space between romantic dreamstate and numb reality like few before. "It's amazing that our brains are capable of sustaining this whole existence of imagination of these dreams and goals and ambitions," mulled Jonas, chatting from her Fredericksburg home. "But sometimes that's enough. Because sometimes the action isn't really critical to get you through the day." Drawing from memories of love-struck travels around desert California in a converted Greyhound bus, and scribbled notes taken between tour stops in dusty West Texas, The Southwest Sky and Other Dreams overlays relatable characters and circumstances with the fathomless mystery of the human condition. Astonishingly articulate and atmospheric, it turns the desert's dichotomous sense of endless space and counter intuitive claustrophobia both actual and imagined - into a profoundly lucid metaphor that lingers long after its final notes.