Reviews
Kate Waters Album: Some Comfort
Label: Wild Raspberry
Tracks: 11
Website: https://www.katewatersmusic.com
A Houston-based classically trained pianist and music therapist, Waters approaches her songwriting as a way of communicating emotions and feelings, featuring songs written over the past 20 years and tracing her journey through different loves, heartbreaks and hopes, her sophomore album appropriately opens with 'Words', keening pedal steel, mandolin and picked guitar riding Latin-coloured syncopation as it unfold the limitations of verbal communication ("our conversations don't always represent us well/And sometimes sayin' what I mean/Doesn't help me deal with the problem, isn't a release"), frustration evident in the lines "if these walls could talk, sometimes I think/they'd do a much better job than me", as she speaks about listening between the spaces.
Featuring David Burchfield on harmonies, 'Next Right Thing' introduces fiddle for an optimism-fuelled ballad about love helping you in taking the right steps when direction seems unsure ("As soon as I look up I find that I can't quite see/A thought, a prayer, a breath for air, hold onto me/But you are the next right thing for me").
Again with fiddle and mandolin, the pace shifts up a gear with the mid-tempo bluegrassy shuffle of 'Honey I'm Tired', another songs about rising above and breaking through the barriers when you feel a relationship's not going nowhere ("We've been choppin' at this block for twelve long hours…and I don't know what it's for anymore") but keeping going until, continuing the metaphor, the stone cracks and "up comes a vine of green and gold".
Of course, not all relationships can be saved,, a point that informs the mournful banjo loop of the slow, bluesily trudging 'Really Over' where, while wondering if it is, she comes to conclude that "like the abandoned parking lot/Where you take your dog/On his midnight walk/Life's so empty now".
Marking the half-way mark, 'Consumed' is a solo piano ballad soaked in regret at what's lost ("This love inside my heart burned this body and tore apart/I love and I wound at the same… there's nothing left[ to say or do") but also the possibility of moving forward ("everywhere I turn, the field grows greener from this burn/And love watches while we sleep/Its heart is singing, leading us to/The open water, where death is now consumed").
Conjuring the soulful Southern Americana of The Band, the organ-underpinned title track is both call for solace when love wields both freedom and a knife and a determination to come out the other side(" I ain't leaving this life yet 'cause I keep waking up every day/And that means that life isn't done with me yet"), though the line "I wanna leave, but I always stay" suggests the chains that an abusive relationship can entail.
Accordion and fiddle give the bittersweet 'Had To Give' an old time folksy feel to its heartfelt story of a coming together and a falling apart ("I needed more - I wanna have kids/Be a Mr. and a Mrs., I've waited long enough now/Yeah I needed commitment - no buts, ands or ifs") but also of gratitude ("You gave me music - permission to use it/Make it up on the spot, letting go of all my thoughts …you were there for me when my sweet momma died/Making us coffee in the middle of the night") and not looking back in anger ("You left me at the altar, you broke my heart/But it clarified my mind, and gave me a brand new start/And I'd forgive you if there was something to forgive/But you gave me all the love you had to give")
Another piano ballad, 'Wasting Time' again talks of moving on when a relationship's come to a cul-de-sac in a desert road ("Gave me a diamond ring, then you took it back/Promised your love twice more, let it fall through the cracks") and, again without recriminations ("I have mostly got no hard feelings/What was my floor was just your ceiling/So we made love and fought, and it gave its healing"), finding a new path to travel.
As such, it's fittingly followed by the deep baritone twang of 'Getting Better' ("Leaves keep turning, dreams go awry/Gotta keep on climbing above the tree line…I hold the sky like I hold my plans/I let my heart break and grow a whole new branch") before, featuring banjo, fiddle and both strummed acoustic and soaring electric guitar, officially ending with the driving cosmic folk rock 'Peace On Earth' with its reflection on and hope for peace as "stars up there in the blackest night/Twinkle like the wrinkled eye of one who loves me dear" and there's "consolations in each word".
There is, though, a bonus track with 'It's Love', a quietly strummed acoustic and pedal steel backing written as a poem on the nature of love as she reflects on the forms it takes and how it expresses itself ("It holds the power of the morning hour/That forms the drops of dew upon a petaled frame/And it quenches all your senses/To form the memories that can't be overcame…like glass, without shards/Like a mirror in water/Clear, not hard/And near, not far"). Raised in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, this is Southern Comfort at its finest.
Mike Davies
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