Hatcheck Girl
Album: At 2 In The Morning
Label: Gallway Bay
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.hatcheckgirl.net

For their fifth album of spooked American folk, Ann Arbor born singer-songwriter Annie Gallup and New York writer/producer Peter Gallway have stripped everything down to the bone, with just their two voices and guitars, Gallup occasionally colouring between the lines with dobro, lap steel and banjo, to create the early hours feel of the title.

Identifying connection as the thread that weaves through the songs, Gallway cites Cohen, Joni, Eric Taylor and Charlie Smith (whose words provide the tale of the ageing, lonely and isolated fruit picker with a past of failed marriage and romances in I Speak To Fewer People) as inspirations though his spoken delivery of opening track Texas, a tribute to some unnamed songwriter whose days are numbered, perhaps suggests Daniel Lanois is in there too. Like that, many of the numbers here are more stories with musical accompaniment than songs (Gallway also cites Raymond Carver among his literary influences); Gallup's whispered, hushed delivery of Tornados Like Trains, Gallway's autobiographical reflections on his musical journey and partnering with Gallup (Red) on Beggar And A Thief with its backwards tape effect and dobro, the narrator of Leaving relating the way she ended her various broken and mismatched relationships and, Gallup again taking soft, feathery lead, the folksy divorce tale Three Wives with its chorus about how "you never think it's gonna end like that."

These are songs to curl up with and sink into, letting the characters and the lives that inhabit them work on your imaginations and emotions, writing your own chapters and endings for the woman touched by the words of the old poet (The Peot Was An Old Man) or the outcast in Steel Clouds And Cold Cold Rain who becomes a famous New York painter.

It ends with its two tenderest moments, Gallway taking lead and Gallup harmonising on the beautiful love song Christmas Roses as he sings "you never know where the wind will lead, all I know is we were chosen", and the lovely Coda-Remember, the pair duetting on a fond recollection of a departed poet-musician with "your little dog and your vintage Vincent." Although I'm curious to know who they're singing about, it doesn't really matter for these are universal stories of the common and connected hearts that beat within both the breasts of others and ourselves.

Mike Davies