Melissa Ferrick - Still Right Here (2011)

Songwriters generally get more mileage out of unhappiness -- especially being unhappy in love -- than contentment, but folk-rock singer/songwriter Melissa Ferrick attempts to buck that trend on Still Right Here, which is her first album to be released on an independent label, MPress, and not on her own Right On imprint, since 2000, as well as being her first studio recording of new original compositions played with a band since 2006's In the Eyes of Strangers. (In the interim, there's been a concert album, Live at Union Hall, an acoustic album, Goodbye Youth, and a covers album, Enough About Me.) Ferrick acknowledges as early as the second song, "Headphones On," that "Life hurts," but also notes that "Life needs love to fall in." She has managed to fall in love in her life by the next song, "You Let Me Be," and having reached middle age, she recognizes that such an experience is precious, telling herself in "Seconds Like These," "I gotta remember to remember seconds like these." "I Will Back You Up" is a pledge of loyalty ("I will back you up even when you're wrong"), and the album closes with a song that also would be appropriate to some Ferrick seasonal collection, "This Time of Year," a reflection on being in love and with one's lover as one year turns into the next. That song has a Celtic feel, but elsewhere Ferrick explores pop/rock and folk-pop styles as she sings in a voice that may be in the same upper alto register as Maria Muldaur, but seems to borrow some of its phrasing from that low alto Joan Armatrading. That gives Ferrick an occasional Caribbean bounce to her vocals, and a bounciness is appropriate to an album celebrating a love that, for once, is going well.