Annie Stokes’ songs have different strokes for different folks, who are just everyday people.
Annie Stokes is a bonafide, multi-faceted Americana musician, who sings songs of grief, belonging, permanence, gender dynamics, double standards, the lingering ache for validation from past friends and lovers, reclaiming boundaries in the digital age, and the intense, alchemical friendship young women experience in their twenties. That’s all you need to know. I like it. You should buy it. The end.
Hold on there, Keystroke Kowboy. You owe Mrs. Stokes another 300 or more words, so you’d better start typing.
Okay. Calm down. She doesn’t need me to tell folks her new record “Ghostwriter” is one they shouldn’t overlook. I can just paste in a couple YouTube links and call it a day. If people could just hear the fiddle-driven ‘Country Wife,’ which would not be out of place in either Appalachia or the Scottish Highlands. It roars with energy as Stokes circumvents any filters that might have been holding her back. This old life is what we make it / Take my dress and just unlace it.
Of course, the song isn’t entirely about a roll in the hay. Irony alert! “This song is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the empty allure of trad wives,” Stokes asserts, “and a very sincere nod to the lasting allure of wanting to feel happy and secure.” She takes hold of that idea with both hands and explores the sense of confinement that suburban life often brings, as well as the allure that escaping into a wilder, more down-to-earth life might hold. That becomes the new ideal of being a “country wife”, a woman who sets her own terms for her needs.
“Ghostwriter” is her most confident and direct set of songs yet, combining everything she and her band do best and more. It is a treasure trove of priceless lyrical trinkets. And she sure has a way with wry quips.
For example, in ‘Tarot Reader’s House,’ Stokes’ character is driving down route 29 for no good reason. I drive past the tarot reader’s house / Who warned me about water, and you. The couple has split and the girl believes she won (I built my house on victory), but apparently the guy didn’t necessarily come out the loser (You’re doin’ fine, and you’ve got a dog). But she’s not completely over it, trying on who she used to be like an out-of-season dress and taking just a little too much pleasure in thinking that dog of his barks a lot. (btw: Route 29 runs North to South through Charlottesville, Virginia.)
Apparently, Stokes and her husband and songwriting partner, Will Berger, holed themselves up in a cabin by the Shenandoah River for a weekend in December and sketched out the bones of what would become “Ghostwriter.” That’s impressive considering last year it took Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings four years to come out of their Woodland studio with a completed album.
The formula for “Ghostwriter” was to lean more on her banjo as a rhythm instrument, while Berger used the bass to push the melodic narrative of the songs. They brought in Marty Garfield to add fiddle to the mix, which works nicely in the country hues of the first track, ‘Open Secret,’ a break-up song of sorts. Stokes wrote about “making a monumental change in my longest relationship – the one I had with social media.” You have to wonder if Mark Zuckerberg has a dog that barks.
‘Built to Last’ is a road song or a love song (the car breaks down, the romance doesn’t), countrified by its rubbery guitar accents and swaying, gentle rhythm to whispery soft, Emmylou-similar vocals. She reckons with climate change and political instability on ‘Belong Here,’ fiddle notes twirling like pirouettes as she summons the inspiration from Hemmingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” Country-rock drives ‘Twenty-Three,’ a penetrating rocker with a catchy chorus. It has to do with her best friend going through a divorce at the time both young women were age 23.
Stokes wrote the songs on her third LP concurrently with events happening in her life, which lends a diary-ish, confessional feel to the album, almost as if she’s letting listeners hear her internal monologue in real time. “Ghostwriter” is a set of songs about that time of life when grappling with self-discovery and self-acceptance, and feeling alone but seeking connection. Those themes surface regularly as in the pillow-soft, finger-picked title track that closes the album, which concerns a friend that lost her life at a young age. “The world will keep going on without her,” Stokes laments, “but her memory will always stay the same, and that feels somehow eternal and this impossibly sad reminder of the fact that she’s now just a point in time. Anyway, grieving someone is like letting them ghostwrite the rest of your life.”
All of these songs are good: honest, open-hearted, effortlessly tuneful and highly relatable, whether you’re 20-something years old or you just remember what it was like to be 20-something years old. To paraphrase one star purveyor of 60/70s funk, sometimes she’s right and sometimes she’s wrong, but her own beliefs are in her songs.
