Lisa Bastoni - Backyard Birds (2021)

One of the pandemic’s many effects on Americana music is there’s been a lot of introspective, person-with-acoustic-guitar-staring-out-from-their-back-porch kind of material getting published recently. After all when you’re stuck at home for so long, ultimately what else is there to do but think? And quite apart from a title as resonant of that domestic perspective as ‘Backyard Birds’, the publicity blurb from US singer-songwriter Lisa Bastoni’s seven-track EP states loud and proud that it was “made out of a desire to continue creating and sharing despite the limitations of the pandemic”.

However, within minutes of starting to listen, and despite there being a fair amount of acoustic guitar sounds running through the EP in general, any temptation to write off the Massachusetts-based artist’s first album in two years as just one more meditative mid-paced pandemic-inspired country-folk production quickly evaporates – because, while it has some of those characteristics for sure, formulaic or unoriginal ‘Backyard Birds’ certainly ain’t.