Here With Me, the latest album by New York singer-songwriter Jennifer O'Connor, opens with "The Church and the River," a stark ballad led by long, trembling chords that stretch like shadows below O'Connor's voice. It may not be the saddest song you've ever heard, but it certainly sounds that way—at least at first.
"It's funny you say that," O'Connor tells the Scene as she drives through Arizona between tour stops. "It's a love song."
And it's true: Listen to the song again and you realize that between the church and the river, those two deeply symbolic locations—nurture and nature, perhaps—there is a moment of truth about what two women can mean to each other. "Every promise that I've ever made," O'Connor sings, in a measured tone that never veers into sentimentality, "I want to keep them now / And I am not afraid."
If the song's lyrics belie its melancholy atmosphere, that's also largely true of the album as a whole. "I think the feel of the record is very sad, even though there are a lot of hopeful sentiments," O'Connor says. "I think there's a lot of minor keys on this new record.... On Over the Mountain it was the opposite. I don't think I did that intentionally, but it is an interesting point."
And even if that design is unintentional, it is, at the very least, consistent. The first up-tempo cut on Here With Me, "Daylight Out," is also the most bummed-out. "I'm gonna go back where I started," O'Connor sings, as the song barrels along on hard-strummed guitars and a galloping beat, "It's gonna be so broken-hearted." In its upbeat-but-sad strategy the song resembles "Hole in the Road," a quick, smart break-up song that made the MP3 blog rounds and helped to quickly raise her national profile.
Even in her latest album's more somber moments, there's a bit of a spring in O'Connor's voice. She's been compared to early Liz Phair, more for the timbre of her singing than her songwriting outlook, but on With Me she asks more of her voice than Phair's flattened, weary-sounding delivery ever did; here and there, O'Connor tries out vocal flourishes—soul-searching, vulnerable—of the sort you don't often find on indie rock records.
She may be the most plaintively emotive singer on her label (Matador, Phair's old stomping grounds), but even so, O'Connor knows, unlike a lot of first-name-last-name singer-songwriters out there, when to shut up and let the music speak. Here With Me's title track ends not with lofty, open-throated vowels, but with an unexpected rush of guitar trills that communicate a wistful joy—the kind that wordy sentiment would too easily oversell. "We knew we were going to record quickly and mostly live as a band," O'Connor explains, "so we spent a lot of time pre-production-wise, figuring out all the arrangements."
When O'Connor plays The End on Tuesday, though, her set will be more pared-down, with just a multi-instrumental accompanist and no drums. Songs like the achingly spare "Valley Road 86" and album closer "Next to Mine" should lend themselves nicely to that kind of set-up. And though she admits "I'm not sure I've found the right place to play yet"—meaning that she's yet to find a consistent audience here—O'Connor is looking forward to her Nashville appearance. "I really wanted to come back," she says. "It's a really great, historical town and I always want to spend more time than we've been able to. I like the feeling of it."
Might she be getting lost in the shuffle among all the other words-and-music types here in town? "I've heard there are a few songwriters there," she says, laughing.
Email sharuch@nashvillescene.com or call 244-7989 ext. 271.
