Valazza’s transitional third album reflects the changes in her personal life.
There have been very few albums released so far this year that have been as highly anticipated as “From Newman Street”, the latest offering from Kassi Valazza. This new album follows her much lauded sophomore release “Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing”, which saw the light of day during the summer of 2023, receiving plaudits from across all musical platforms, including a 9/10 from these very pages, with only Jason Isbell’s “Weathervanes” preventing it from being voted AUK’s album of the year, and even ‘UNCUT‘, deeming it worthy of a position in their top 25. Such levels of success do, however, bring a weight of expectancy and, consequently, a level of pressure to deliver, something that Valazza has gone on record as recognising, aware of the danger of stagnation and stating “In songwriting and in life, you can’t keep expecting the same thing to work everytime”.
By the time Valazza’s thoughts turned to recording this new album, she had been living in Portland for over a decade and knew it was time for a change. Having originally set her sights on Nashville, she eventually settled in New Orleans, but for the recording of the album, she chose to return to her former hometown to work with Matt Thompson at Echo Echo Studios. Interestingly, of the ten new songs written for the album, half were written in Portland, the other half at her new home, and yet though there is nothing to specify the origins of each track, the song sequence for the album is audibly intentional, with the title track, a tribute to an apartment she lived in and loved deeply during her time in the Pacific Northwest a significant choice to close the album out.
The album opens with ‘Better Highways’, full of brightly coloured chords that immediately evokes a sixties folk vibe with its narrative tale of turning your back on the materialist world for simpler pleasures. That ambience continues with ‘Birds Fly’; the use of vibraphone and space echo against the subtle touches of a pedal steel guitar, helping to create a musical juxtaposition that gently soothes Valazza’s melancholic poetry. Elsewhere, the introduction of a fiddle gives ‘Roll On’ a more rustic bluegrass feel, with Valazza’s achingly reflective vocal delivery heightening the sense of letting go and moving on. That aura is continued on the listless lament ‘Weight Of The Wheel’, where some delightful pedal steel guitar from Erik Clampitt enhances the pensive sadness of the narrative, while the faint echo of ‘Snow Bird’, a song written by Canadian songwriter Gene MacLellan that was a big hit for Anne Murray, filters through the chorus.
Where Valazza’s penchant for the sixties singer-songwriter movement could be subtly detected on her previous album, albeit from a relatively broad musical palette, on this new offering, the influences appear narrower and the source more obvious throughout, in particular the early work of Joni Mitchell. Most prevalent are ‘Shadow Of Lately’ where the tension and release of the vocal phrasing draws immediate comparison, while the uptempo ‘Your Heart’s A Tin Box’, with its driving 12 string guitar that provides the perfect conduit for the lyrical acuity of the narrative highlighting the struggles of the Universal artist, though one feels that the core of the poetic sentiment may lie closer to home. Later in the album ‘Market Street Savior’, underlines the similarities in writing between Valazza and Mitchell, both more comfortable operating from a deeply personal perspective lyrically, rather than simply telling stories through songs, though it would be fair to say that to date Valazza has yet to match the sagacious level of Mitchell’s poetry.
However, all that said, “From Newman Street” is still a good album. Okay, it may not be a seismic step forward or show any discernible growth from its predecessor, but it certainly helps to cement Valazza’s position amongst the upper echelon of the current crop of today’s singer-songwriters. This third offering feels very much like a transitional album where Valazza learns to become comfortable with the uncomfortable whilst saying one last fond farewell to her past before turning her thoughts to the future. One can’t help but feel that the best is still to come from Valazza, which augurs well for the future, but for now, “From Newman Street” will do just fine.
