Music Review: 12 Ways to Live

Album: 12 Ways to Live (2007) – By Emily White [Folk Rock / Acoustic / Indie]

There is a danger in waiting too long to write a review (this album came out late last year) and that is that one can be too biased one way or another to write objectively. And unfortunately I am biased: I love this album; I really do. But then, I am not in the business of writing objective reviews (whatever that means) so I’ll just try and tell you why I think this album is so wonderful.

“12 Ways to Live” is Emily White’s second offering after “Every Pulse” in 2005. There is no doubt that most people who had listened to “Every Pulse” would have pretty good expectations from this one (because “Every Pulse” was a pretty good CD) and I was one of them. But Emily easily exceeds those expectations here with a thoughtful and genuinely beautiful work. She revisits similar themes of love, relationships, the female experience, oblique (and often direct) politics, and social commentary; in other words experiences being a sensitive human being. The musical and vocal style: simple, lucidly evocative; is not so much a re-invention as an expansion of her repertoire (and on present evidence it is quite a repertoire and growing). The writing is very much in the same vein full of visible imagery and heartfelt emotion. So this seems very much a logical progression from the first. But then again, that’s just a too simplistic way of looking at things, because this is also a much more assured Emily White: older, more confident, and just secure in her abilities as an artist. She is unafraid of taking more risks, pushing the envelope ever so much further with exceptional results.

One of the things to like for me personally is the writing. Traditionally, that’s something that I respond to the most (and something that I find sadly lacking in a lot of current work: that lyrically a song is a piece of poetry which grows with the accompanying music but stands its own in the absence it). There are songs here composed of beautiful lines; lines that remain with you long after the album is done and which return to you again and again at odd times. Consider “…there are things that water can’t tell you / For which water just doesn’t have the words” from “7th & A”; or “Turn me into Stone / So much better for the keeping”; or “they carved up the city to make more room for ships” from “bayou”; or something from “Mad Intuition” my favorite song in the album: “We cut through all of the noise/Windows are open to the sounds of steel”. And beautiful lines add up to wonderful songs such as “Georgia”, Secret Song” and of course “Mad Intuition”.

I am not sure what the “12 Ways to Live” of the title refers to. There is a piece of artwork listing 12 ways to live, ranging from “In love”, “On the Road” to “With Regret” and “Scared”, but I don’t think that half explains it. The songs range widely in emotion, tone and mood: from palpably aching to (hesitantly) upbeat; quiet to bustling with life; lonely, depressed to being comfortable, and in love. In a way, the “12 Ways to Live” might be 12 ways in which we all live at different times of our life, or maybe it’s just an expression of many people’s lives, because as she points out, “every story is the singer’s no matter what they sing.” But that kind of reminds me of a famous line credited to Fellini, “if I make a movie about a fish it would still be about me.” Throughout there is the feeling of immediacy, with the rawness of the vocals, the spare arrangements and personal lyrics, that some part of her is being revealed to us. And in effect, as I said before, it is her self-assurance that allows her to do this. The very personal nature of it is perhaps what makes it most special. Songs about love are not just restricted to a “lover” but includes her mother (Good Enough Reason). There is a song of a break-up… in friendship (7th & A). Certainly, these are stories from her own life.

And to add to this there are little touches which may seem surprising at first but are probably the things that make the album grow on you. There are “aching refrains”, little inflexions and changes in vocal modulation, memorable musical interludes and changes in the rhythm/style midway through a song. These all sometimes add up to the sneaking suspicion of having heard or known this from somewhere before, like the chorus on “Believe in Me” or the instrumental passage in “Bayou”. My theory about why that happens is because for certain pieces of music, certain songs there is an implacable logic to it, when things just fall perfectly into place it seems so natural. Of course, this feeling is nothing new, it’s happened to me many times before with music, books and more. But it’s oh so exciting when it happens with something new.

One of the most interesting things for me has been that each person that I have recommended the album to has a different song (or songs) that they like. That in itself shows the variety and quality of the work. My personal favorites in addition to “Mad Intuition” are “Georgia” and “Secret Song”. In truth I like all the songs to varying degrees. As a whole Emily White’s “12 Ways to Live” has now become a worthy addition to my Essential Collection. The long wait and resulting bias in writing this review is justified.
Emily White’s Website: http://www.emily-white.com/
MySpace Page: http://www.myspace.com/emilywhite
Buy it here: http://emily-white.com/store.html
OR http://cdbaby.com/cd/emilywhite2

*This article first appeared on Illinois Institute of Technology's student magazine TechNews: http://technews.iit.edu/index.php?id=1079