| Carrie Rodriguez, Love and Circumstance By Celine Keating |
 Carrie Rodriguez doesn’t just cover the love songs in her fourth album, she inhabits them. The Austin, Texas, singer-songwriter grew up among musicians, studied violin at Berklee College of Music, plays fiddle, electric mandolin, and tenor guitar, and toured with Chip Taylor. That pedigree shows on Love and Circumstance, which has a big, polished sound rich in texture and instrumentation. Hans Holzen (guitar and mandolin) and Kyle Kegerreis (bass) are joined by guests Bill Frisell (guitar), Greg Leisz (lap steel), and Buddy Miller and Aoife O’Donovan (harmony vocals). Rodriguez’s voice is arresting whether she’s slowing down Lucinda Williams’s “Steal Your Love,” giving a fresh interpretation to Richard Thompson’s “Waltzing’s for Dreamers,” or belting it out on “Big Love” (Little Village). This is masterful musicianship, with primacy given to the guitars, which blend beautifully yet inhabit different spaces within the songs, so that the character of each—tremolo, acoustic, electric, tenor—shines. There are lovely touches on every cut, like the ecstatic single lines on “La Puñalda Trapera” that play up Rodriguez’s soulfulness or the way Frisell’s guitar dances jazzily around the single repeated notes chiming from Rodriguez’s mandolin on Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” A stunner. (Ninth Street Opus) |
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