Jenny Mitchell: Forest House (digital outlets)

As we noted recently when writing about the rise of certain genres, in that instance dream pop-cum-shoegaze, “Anyone who steps back and observes the changing tides of popular music would have seen the success of country music coming a little while ago.

“And the reasons were simple: country music tells stories, has some stock imagery and metaphors, familiar melodic patterns and allows the writer to insert their own narrative”.

A couple of decades ago driving across the Southern states for a few months, the car radio was tuned to country stations . . . without which we never would have heard songs like God Blessed Texas, What Was I Thinkin' (“hood slidin' like Bo Duke”) and Letters From Home which, taken together, covered Southern pride, an outlaw mentality and a sentimental y'all in a foreign battleground where its sandy.

The ground was prepared long ago through Hank, Loretta, the Byrds, Waylon'n'Willie, Kristofferson, Carlene Carter and Rosanne Cash, Garth Brooks . . .

We picked up a fair swag of that story in another article, and of course there has been a long tradition of country music in this country going back to these folks and before. 

The more recent wind shift that brought country music to mainstream attention should favour Gore's long-serving Jenny Mitchell: she won the Golden Guitar Award at 18, is popular in Australia (two Golden Guitar nominations), has an Aotearoa Music Award for her 2018 album Wildfires, plays in Nashville and is currently touring Australia supporting Kasey Chambers.

This fourth album offers thoughtful and sometimes downbeat songs with a mature sensibility: the sensitive Little Less Lonely speaks of a young woman “in love with girl she calls each night, a little less lonely”; the bruised emotions and desert-wide sound of Wives Who Wait when the call is “a quarter-past overdue”; Square and Plain is breakup ballad (“You were never the picture I had framed so I guess I'm the only one to blame”).

With fiddle and a backbeat she takes a Kiwi sensibility to the Tennessee dancefloor (No Cash, No Meal), considers the tough life (Wildflower with banjo), gets Tami-like on the thumping Southern soul of Where the Water's Cold and offers refined poetic images in the The Curse.

Adult stories, internal narratives, bare emotions and no boot-scootin'.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here