Hopeful Woman

Description

Natalie Jane Hill's new album, *Hopeful Woman*, is comprised of delicate, human-scale songs where people strive to reconcile with wild nature and cities; rearrange their rooms and open windows to get closer to the outside world and its choruses of frogs and crickets; try, in vain, to communicate around a kitchen table; and face natural disasters. If a form of self-discovery emerges through these narratives, it is largely due to the scale of their scenes, the modesty of their ambitions, where tumult, adaptation, and growth are assimilated by the gentle movements and reactions of the body, its moments of quietude, observation, and reflection. “In the river of life I will fly,” Hill sings in “Oranges,” a song that could perfectly serve as her manifesto. “Change, love, grow, and try.” The album *Hopeful Woman* was recorded live in two parts: first in Lockhart, Texas (her home state), then in western North Carolina, where she now resides. She surrounded herself with a small ensemble of collaborators whose arrangements, both expansive and precise, vibrate with a nuance and delicacy reminiscent of recordings by another talented Texan singer-songwriter, the great Edith Frost. The virtuoso multi-instrumentalist Mat Davidson, her partner on the album, appears with an almost supernatural grace: listen to his poignant pedal steel on “Never Left Me,” his pastoral and psychedelic flute subtly unfolding in “Lucky to Be,” or the layered violins on “Blue is the Color of My Sun.” Everything serves Hill's magnificent voice, which evokes Hope Sandoval or Karen Dalton, but with more humanity, strength, and authenticity. It is closest to the earth that hope takes root and grows, not with unbridled and carefree fertility, but in measured steps, one by one, as the storm forms, rages, then subsides. “And I know in time we will give and let go,” Hill sings. “And I know this time I will give and let go.” Her hope is imbued with wisdom, humanity, and remarkable accuracy. The same can be said of this album.