(2021) Abigail Dowd - Beautiful Day


Review:
Recorded in February last year, the 12 songs on North Carolina based Abigail Dowd’s third album emerged after two nightmare years that, newlywed, saw the couple’s home devastated by Hurricane Florence and a series of floods, leaving her living with friends and family for seven months while her husband, bassist Jason Duff, attempted renovations (only to be flooded again nine months later) and also suffering from an infection caused by the water damage that threatened to prevent her singing again. It would seem to be almost impossible to sustain any sense of positivity under such circumstances, but it was the belief that better days would come that pulled her through and forged the majority of the songs that speak of hope, faith, letting go and gratitude. As such, balancing loneliness with a realisation of not being alone, the musically upbeat folk-country fingerpicked title track opens the album with her singing “Outside of my window it’s a beautiful day” declaring “I have seen darkness/I’ve got shadows inside/But I hold on for the light/I have never known a sorrow that didn’t make me stronger/There’s never been a day that the sun don’t rise”. Electric guitar sets the mood for the musically tougher, vocally drawled Diamond, the first song written for the album, just before the first flood, and about the spark within that shines even when you feel lost and have given up on your faith, followed by the lilting One Moment At A Time, a song she wrote while sitting waiting for a traffic light to turn green about taking life a day at a time, healing yourself within so you can live at peace and embrace the connections we share with others. A fingerpicked and dobro shaded instrumental, St. Vrain was written while sitting on a boulder near the titular Colorado river during a 2019 songwriting retreat, shortly after having fixed up the house for the first time, as, with its resonator guitar and tribal rhythm feel, was the subsequent bluesier River, a song about letting your burdens wash away and experiencing a new baptism because “If you don’t live your truth/Hell will come find you”. By contrast, Apple Tree harks to her time living in Maine and the 120-acre farm where she spent every weekend, two trees in a field leading her to reflect on how relationships that you think are forever can come and go (“Seven years ago/We planted seeds in a row/Talked about getting old/And watching them grow…I thought that I knew my heart/’Til I tore yours apart”). Then, with handclaps and jazzy piano, comes the bluesy slow march Judgement Day, a song about the sacred feminine that explores society’s expectations of women and how it institutionalises them, specifically in the pressure to take their husband’s name after marriage, forsaking the legacy of their mothers and grandmothers. In addressing a woman’s identity in a patriarchal world, the narrator recalls meeting a man who wants to marry her and she replies “ sir you seem a kind one/But your questions still remain/Who I am and where I come from/Hell, I don’t even know my name”. It also comes with a sharp commentary on religion in the line “God damn I am tired of living this way/For the chance to meet the good Lord/Another man on Judgment Day”. Drawing on the influence of Janis Ian, the powerful Don’t Want To Talk About It is another sparse, bluesy number, written in the first person (interestingly, a man) through the lens of drinking to drown out trauma and trying to understand without passing judgement where someone in such a situation is coming from. Indeed, there’s a strong Old Testament feel to many of the songs as they deal with the fall and redemption, not least in After The Fall which, opening on churchy piano notes, picks up a tribal rhythm tempo and, again adopting male voice, draws on childhood memories of a Pentecostal preacher (“Mama took me every Sunday to the church and made me pray/Daddy said I was a sinner and that God would make me pay/But I, I will outrun em all/I was born a man after the fall”) and, once more, looks beyond what seems obvious (“They’ll hang me if they catch me, they don’t know the work I do/To keep them safe at night from all those devils on the loose”). That opposition of light and darkness and navigating through the latter to find the former echoes strongly in the sparse lap steel stained keening lament Rise Above, a song written after hearing an astrological prediction of hard times ahead and eventual clarity, and then subsequently learning a friend had had a relapse of acute leukaemia after being clear for more than two years, the line “while I navigate the darkness/And walk through hell to rise above” taking on a defiant, anthemic quality. The final two numbers draw inspiration from indigenous cultures and their connection to the earth. First comes the dobro and acoustic fingerpicked Southern country textured Run, which draws on a passage about the loss of indigenous language, here the Polynesians, in Wade Davis’s book Wayfinders and is written in the voice of the last person to speak their language (“I am the last woman of my tongue/There’s no one left where I come from”) and extends it to speak about a far wider survival (“We’ve lost the language of the land/There’s no woman, child or man/Who knows where they come from/We are running out of time/To save this planet, human kind”). Finally, the benediction Grandmother Moon (& Sacred Fire) was written after attending a Sacred Fire Foundation event, an organisation dedicated to keeping indigenous wisdom alive where one of the speakers talked about being watched over by the spirit of her father in the form of a bear, resonating with her own experience of, after her father’s passing when she was young, being visited every birthday by an owl. Backed by distant organ and taking a blues spiritual vibe it plays as a hymn of gratitude to nature and the creator as she sings “Mother earth walks by my side/I never feel alone/Her mountains, valleys, rivers, streams are the places I call home/She gives me everything I need”. Musically, vocally and lyrically absorbing, it may chart one woman’s story of rising above the odds, but in troubled times such as these, it offers a universally inspirational voice to ride the flood rather than being drowned by it.





Tracklist:
01 - Beautiful Day
02 - Diamond
03 - One Moment at a Time
04 - St. Vrain
05 - River
06 - Apple Trees
07 - Judgement Day
08 - Don't Want to Talk About It
09 - After the Fall
10 - Rise Above
11 - Run
12 - Grandmother Moon


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits