Eilen Jewell’s debut album, Boundary County, is one of the best albums I’ve heard this year. If I’d heard it a little sooner, it would have easily made the Best of 2006 list I posted last month.Like Gillian Welch or perhaps a folksy Norah Jones (but so much better the The Little Willies), Eilen produces music that’s beautifully melodic and ageless, with poetry for lyrics and vocals that produce auditory bliss.
The title track, Boundary County, is a song about a homesick wanderer, and Eilen sings it with sadness and longing. Accompanied by understated drums, violin, lap steel, upright bass and her own acoustic guitar, the instrumentation fits the lyrics flawlessly.
The story of the lonesome traveler continues in the next two songs, Till You Lay Down Your Heavy Load and Hey Hey Hey, which are both mournful and lyrically beautiful:
What I need’s a grand piano to do things right
Cool my fingers in its pools of black and white
I need time, clear to eternity
Half of it to set it straight and the other just to sleep
And Jewell adds her harmonica to Hey Hey Hey, which fits the mood of the lonesome traveler, and seals the deal for me. I’m a sucker for harmonicas.
The pace is picked up a bit in Mess Around, a fun track reminiscent of (but not nearly as fast as) Ray Charles’s song of the same name. Daniel Kellar plays a great violin (or what I like to call a fiddle) solo midway through the song and adds to the track’s old-timey feel.
The tempo of the album continues its upward swing with Back to Dallas, a song with more great fiddle playing and the accomplished dobro stylings of Jerry Miller. One of my favorite songs on the album, I oftentimes play it a few times before moving on to No Place to Go, a track that adds electric piano to Jewell’s repertoire.
A little deeper in the album, Eilen turns her sights on New Orleans, with The Flood, a song both angry and politically charged.
Look at the pictures
All black faces
Our leaders call themselves distracted
I call them racist
Can anyone among you please explain
What went down on the banks of the Ponchartrain?
It’s you our leader who’s to blame
You lay sweet New Orleans out to waste
Jewell closes the album with You Can’t Take My Song Away, a song that describes perfectly her music and the strength of this album. With just her guitar and harmonica for accompaniment, her words explain her music much better than mine, so I’ll let her take it from here.
You Can’t Take My Song Away
My strings how they jangle
My voice how it will rise
In a feathery tangle
And meet the truth above this world, among the skies
More powerful than riches
More precious than your gold
Holier than your churches
Bewildering as desert cold
You can lock me in jail
Cheat me of all I own
Tie me to the rails
Leave me forsaken and alone
But you can’t my song away
