URL: sarahparkermusic.com/

The comforting hum of an organ. A soft vocal to remind us of our humanity. Playful guitars that beg for us to remember a simpler time. “You Can’t Tell a Heart” is one of the humbler songs I’ve reviewed recently, but it has a way of really sticking with you after you’ve heard it for the first time alongside its thirteen companion tracks in Strawberry Moon, the new album from acclaimed country singer/songwriter Sarah Parker. Both this tune, the title track, “Rose Hill” and the blazing “Sugartown” must have played over in my head a hundred times recently since coming across this LP, even though none of them share the same beat or narrative. The reason why isn’t as confusing as you’d might think, if we take a second to breakdown this awesome new record.

Strawberry Moon is a fourteen-song walkthrough of the artistic identity of one Sarah Parker. This is Parker’s official debut, and she spared no creative expense it making it everything it could be. There’s swing in “You Can’t Tell a Heart,” “Even When You’re Lonely” and “Keep on Movin’ (The Train Song);” a bit of rollicking balladry in “Road to Your Discovery,” “Talk in This Town” and “Lonely Highway;” and even a touch of folk-pop grit with “I Got to Wander” and “Gypsy Rose.” While each of these songs is a different take on a familiar strain of Americana, they each have one thing in common: the searing tonality of Parker’s divine voice.

YOU TUBE: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKjlW-O222WtxEH–OL52eHPCOT187QCi

Parker can sing. That’s putting it, well, more than mildly. Parker is working with a voice that seems to break through any wall of sound, no matter how intensely mixed or broadly conceived that wall may be. She can penetrate anything. The contrast between the tracks aesthetically, the lyrical differences, even the minute production cues that make one song a little moodier than another – all of this takes a backseat to what she does with the mic in her hand on this record. “Lonely Highway” and “Straight from the Bottle,” would not be as moving as they are here were she absent from the roster. Parker’s seductive crooning in “Road to Your Discovery” is what keeps the entire vibe of this album from going off the road and into a pure elegy-driven country.

A profound poet among us has emerged in Strawberry Moon, and her name is Sarah Parker. Not to be confused with the actress of the same name who bears a much more suspect skillset, Parker carves out an identity all her own in this record through a combination of witty, surreal lyricism that draws from her own personal experiences as well as common-sense storytelling with a feisty accent, and focused musicality that instantly takes an old fashioned country girl like me back to the one place I’ve always called home. Her style is still developing, undoubtedly more so with all of the attention this record is receiving right now, but I have no qualms with saying that she’s just perfect the way she is. Parker’s Strawberry Moon is everything one looks for in a smart new country album, period.

SPOTIFY: open.spotify.com/album/2P63E4Uoiee2uGrGwcTu1G

Clay Burton

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URL: freightrainband.com/track/1233587/outside-ourselves

Freightrain’s Outside Ourselves is a full-length album driven by the stylings of frontman Robert Parker and made up of nine different songs, each one of which is arguably as evocative and beautifully realized as the next. Beyond its illustrious surface cosmetics, however, lies a record that beckons us closer with every listen, enhances our grasp of Parker’s bold tonality, and lends tremendously to concepts of postmodernity in contemporary music. You see, though nine individualized tracks comprise Outside Ourselves, the album itself has a singular narrative. That narrative is expressionism, at the most organic, unclouded level possible. In “Better Man,” that expression comes to us in the form of a petulant, resisting groove propelled by an equally angsty guitar part. The title track employs dissonance in a nonconventional way, using it to define a cushy melody that is anything but chaotic. “I Still Believe” and “You Found Me” might sit on opposite sides of the blues spectrum, but their rhythm is bound by a lush muscularity that is both stunning and yet unrefined, gritty even. Outside Ourselves isn’t merely a new collection of Freightrain songs; it’s a fly-on-the-wall perspective of Robert Parker’s studio process in real time, and it couldn’t be much more thrilling a listen.

Vocals aren’t the primary focus of this record, though they do add a wonderful finishing touch to tracks like “You Found Me,” “Wake Up” and “Better Man.” While in some instances, i.e. “Elijah” and “Wake Up,” it’s easier for the band to stay focused on the textures within their instrumentation as a means of conveying the grander statement in play here, there’s other occasions, like with “Don’t Stop the Music,” where lyrics contribute a certain color to a track that makes the vibration of the music stand out a little more than it would have. There are so many varying degrees of melodicism here that range well beyond the typical lexicon of vocals, guitar and drums, but at the same time there’s never a moment where we feel like we’re being drowned in details and left with nowhere to go. Outside Ourselves is too crisp, too efficiently produced for that to occur.

While all music, at its core, seeks to personify expression in the most fundamental way known to man, it’s much more complicated than it would seem on paper to actually craft a song to be as engaging as anything you’ll find on Outside Ourselves. Parker’s Freightrain project delivers an exceptional performance here, with no one track acting as the centerpiece of this record and each aiding in the creation of a larger, moving narrative that speaks to the very essence of creativity itself. The music is tight, but the ambitions couldn’t be much more gluttonous and out of control. In this scenario, there’s nothing wrong with getting a little greedy – as a result, Outside Ourselves isn’t just a loaded LP with more tenacious tone and rich harmonies than anything else on the market presently, but a rather prophetic release from an artist who has proven himself to be one of the best and brightest in his scene. This is a look into Freightrain’s future, and from where I sit it couldn’t be more enticing.

YOU TUBE: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBeMjQP_a8w

Clay Burton

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