Anne E. Dechant’s still pretty new to Nashville — this show celebrates
Swing, the first album she’s recorded and released here — but she’s been at this singer-songwriter thing for a good long while. For the first five solo albums following the breakup of her band Odd Girl Out, she was Cleveland’s answer to The Indigo Girls — the Amy Ray half in particular — from the alto bite of Dechant’s singing to the folk-rock underpinnings of her sound and the sometimes political bent of her songwriting. If she moved here hoping to get songs cut, she seems already well versed in Music Row imagery — porch swings, beat-up trucks and Hank on the radio. But there are moments on
Swing when her songs, enriched by her political consciousness, nail blue-collar grit in a way few writers do, like her stellar mid-tempo country number “Home To Me,” which zeroes in on the perspective of a teenage girl whose family lost their trailer in a tornado.
— Jewly Hight