After settling into the city and into her new role as a solo singer-songwriter—she’d previously fronted the regionally successful Baton Rouge, La., band Blessed Yes—Nashville newcomer Brooke Waggoner emerged on the scene late last year, provoking a quick and impressive response from normally passive Nashville audiences.
Though she was a semi-finalist in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and was featured on NPR’s Open Mic last December, the LSU grad with a degree in composition and orchestration has become most known locally for her “how’d-she-do-that?” one-woman show, where, with symphony level skill and technical innovation, she summons a stunning world of sound and song from her keyboard. With the help of producer Chad Howat, Waggoner has now managed to translate that sense of awe and energy to disc on her new solo EP, Fresh Pair of Eyes.
Long before she moved to town, Waggoner once consulted with a Nashville Christian music A&R guy, who advised the then-teen piano-pop prodigy that her music wasn’t a good fit with the CCM market. While Waggoner says she’s now glad that she was pushed away from that world, her faith still informs her music. God makes a couple of guest appearances on the record, too: one as the comforting presence preached about by most Protestants (“Wonder-Dummied”), and again on the title track, a poetic ode to feeling separated from the divine. Elsewhere, though, “His” presence is limited to support work while Waggoner’s talents as a pianist and string arranger take over the spotlight.
And throughout Fresh Pair of Eyes, Waggoner’s string arrangements leap, sway and stab in all the appropriate places, lending subtle dramatic nuances and grand emphatic gestures to each carefully composed passage. Often the string section echoes her intricate piano playing, equal parts pop and pops, and as a songwriter she leans heavily on these significant skills to translate what is sometimes left wanting by her words.
Despite the fact that Waggoner’s lyrics would probably fail the Pitchfork test—even as her style recalls critical faves Joanna Newsom and Regina Spektor—on a purely musical level, her words just work. Her rhymes often come in a rush, with internal rhymes running into end-line rhymes, overlapping with words seemingly strung together for pure phonetic sensation (such as the opening lines of “Hush if You Must”: “Hush if you must / If you must so you’ll trust / In the power of your silence / The fear in compliance.”)
She’s most successful at pulling off this sound-over-meaning lyrical approach on the best song of the bunch, “So-So.” This fictional “moving day” song, written shortly before Waggoner’s real-life move to Tennessee, runs through nearly 70 words rhyming with the long “O” sound (or thereabouts). It stretches the moving metaphor—and the listener’s patience—to the breaking point. But she saves the song with a melody so strangely endearing that it might just enter into the rotating soundtrack of your life. She repeats this trick throughout the CD on songs such as “My Legionnaire” and “I Am Mine,” managing to steal away from the edge of silly contrivance by making musical sense, even when the lyrics lose you.
Comments (0)