An evocative and wistful album of reflections on lost love and the life ahead.
A good singer-songwriter record generally requires the artist to match their voice with a winning combination of perceptive, memorable lyrics, strong melodies, and skilled instrumentation and arrangements. Jordan Renzi and her band hit all those buttons on her new album, On Your Side. It weighs in at 30 minutes, and there is no fat or filler here. The wistfully romantic lyrics are mercifully free of cliché (not an easy thing to do), and the songs sound like the poetic expressions of lived experience and hard-gained wisdom.
Jordan Renzi, a Cape Cod-based singer/songwriter, has been writing songs since 2011, and this is her first album since 2019. There is an acoustic version of ‘Busy Living’ (one of the songs on the album) on YouTube dating back eight years, which indicates that at least some of the music has had a lengthy gestation period. She says she has been playing the songs on the album for a year, and describes her music as “Old folk mixed with Americana roots“, a fair description. If one was sampling the record like a fine wine, one might detect hints of the fine, rising English artist, Katherine Priddy and, perhaps, the clear phrasing of Joan Shelley. This is an elegiac album of evocative melancholy.
It helps that Jordan has a fine and sympathetic band supporting her, which provides a rich palette to support her clear and appealing voice. This comprises Mark Usher on lead guitar, Leo Ludwig on bass, Luke Massouh on drums, Lydia Parkington on cello, Alice Malone on violin and Catie Flynn on backing vocals. The record was produced by Jon Evans in the Brick Hall Studios in Orleans.
So, to the songs themselves. The opener, September, expresses the wish that a relationship could have been fixed in that month when she was loved. “Leave me in that September when you loved me, my dear.” It moves on to Busy Living, which expresses the view that you need to live life while you can, but in the knowledge that the end beckons; “Who knows how long until the clock will stop“.
The longest track, Edge Of The Sea, also looks back at a lost love which haunts her still; “Wonder where you are, If you’re happier now”, and the memories it provokes, when “Time has a way of taking forever“. The metaphoric ‘Bird’ has Renzi “Taking in the memory of you” while conceding “The bird we knew has gone“.
Ready For You suggests that the singer just has to sort herself out; “The day will come when all my fixes and glitches have gone“, before she is ready for love. Drive reflects on a life which is “Taking in the view as I pass by, All I’ve got to do is drive“. The album then concludes with the single released last year, On Your Side, which is unabashedly romantic: “My whole heart is on your side, here is a beat to your heart from mine.”
Despite the focus on lost love and the uncertainty of coping with what lies ahead, this is a warm album with sensitive and telling use of guitar, strings and harmonies. Many will relate to the sentiments this talented artist conveys.
