Awna Teixeira
Album: Wild One
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.hazytales.me

Saudade Americana

Sometimes the magic is in that which is untranslatable - from time, place, a person's memory. In Portuguese they have a word 'saudade' which has no direct English translation. It's a kind of nostalgia for something bittersweet that perhaps never was or could have been. It an emotion explored in the music of Portugal and Brazil.

… And in a way it is not too fanciful to say it echoes in the tracks of the new album Wild One from Awna Teixeira. Awna is perhaps best known as a member of Canadian roots group Po' Girl, and on the surface with it's accordions, banjos, ukuleles, and guitars it is into this tradition that the album fits. But to my ears at least (and may be it is Awna's part Portuguese ancestry that suggests it) things more arcane, sometimes psychologically darker, sometimes quirkier echo through the different songs.

In some of the songs you can almost imagine the harmonium in the wooden house on the prairie, and the mood is one of the longing of an exile from a far off land. Other songs - more personal ones - are about people who are in a sense in exile from themselves. Awna has taken the courageous step on writing about the psychological problems that have afflicted her own family.

This is tough writing and the result is an album of fragile beauty with songs like 'blue heart on your sleeve' and 'yellow moon' haunting and memorable. What might have been too dark and austere is made magical by the warmth and expressiveness of Awna's voice. Saudades indeed.

Steve Bonham