From Chicago and based in Atlanta, Strangely In Tune is Coll’s fifth album and one that speaks of resilience and healing, emerging from troubled times transformed with a stronger mindset. Co-produced with Jonny Daly who also plays guitars, bass and banjo alongside various guest musicians, it embraces a spectrum of styles and sounds, from classic Laurel Canyon folk rock to shades of jazz, drums-propelled rock swagger and cosmic piano balladry.
It opens at the heart of the 70s Canyon with the Joni-tinged ‘Better Fly Me Right’ with its swirl of guitars and keyboards, a song she described being about a soul beginning its journey to earth with joyful exuberance and, hence the title, the knowing that with freedom comes responsibility. Ending with studio laughter, it leads into shimmering intro of the steady walking rhythm of the similarly folksy but more psychedelic ‘In And Out Of Time’ with its steady foot stomp beat, percussive stabs and shouts in a call to escape the “cacophony of crazy” and the wounds of a broken heart and find the “sweet spot unlined in between time”.
The album’s most melodically infectious number is ‘Carolina Wren’, a blend of guitars, drums and mellotron written after hearing one singing while she was in the mountains alone with sadness and capturing the power of nature to comfort and heal (“I know you see me sitting here/I hear you near/Though I cannot see you/Your love comes through”), the music mirroring the waterfalls mentioned in the lyrics.
Discordant notes introduce ‘Disappear’, another number shaded with 60s psychedelic folk, underpinned by a tribal-like puttering drum rhythm as the vocals weave in and out of the miasma, evoking the experience of being seen and not seen in a relationship where the other person has an insatiable need for attention , the narrator here exercising her own empowering choice to disappear.
That decision is carried over into the sultry pulsing moodiness and slightly Eastern-tinted ‘The Dream of You’, a song about the power of single-hood as a clear choice (“I have no need for just anyone/To fill up this time, I am truly fine”), or as she puts it being “the keeper of our own gate” while waiting for the right one to come along. Listening, I had thoughts of those evocative musical themes that characterised 70s TV series and films like ‘Midnight Cowboy’.
Picking up on the idea of transformation, backed by piano with recurring musical motifs, ‘Porcupine’ draws on the Japanese art form of Kintsugi where things broken are reconstructed using gold to form a new beauty, a story of alchemy and renewal with the image of the porcupine a metaphor for “being human in this world” where “Quills protect the soft inside/And, also pierce for light”.
By way of a musical swerve, ‘Double Feature’ is a straightforward rocker with Chrissie Hynde vibes that uses the idea of waiting in the cinema for the second half a double bill to begin as a metaphor for being impatient for a change to come and being able to move on (“Got no previews, I can’t see what’s coming up next/Living in this double feature/I don’t like this intermission”).
Another contrast, ‘Tell Jupiter, Hi’ is all ethereal soundscapes crafted by guitar and ambient sounds, and again speaks of transition and moving on (“Tell Jupiter, hi/Way up in the sky/As you pass on by to a brand new light/Soon, a brand new life”) and the notion of pain as the path to paradise (“Here’s to why how long I cried/Wouldn’t have it otherwise when grace is the prize/Bless those who’ve lost/And, who’ve been tossed/All is not lost, though quite the cost/All is not lost”).
Nimbly and simply fingerpicked, ‘Half Along The Way’ tips the hat to that sense of finding a newfound freedom while also accepting we may never get to where we think we’re heading. As she sings “I’m free to take any road/Some are just shorter or further to go/I’ve got no bind to time and this gives me peace of mind”, basically, it’s about appreciating the ride.
Another with Eastern shadings, another pulsing, heady rhythm and opening semi-spoken, ‘Othering’ is a protest song of sorts, a call for inclusiveness rather than division (“Won’t play along, who’s weak or strong/Othering, othering be gone away”) or, more succinctly, “Get over your, over yourself, okay?” It heads to the end with the melodically quirky, strummed vocally double-tracked title track (think Joni meets Buffy Sainte-Marie), and, inspired by opening two empty fortune cookies, a celebration of human resilience (“No matter who stomps on these shoes/I’m strangely immune”) and those choice to laugh rather than feel fear. Floating on an ethereal sea of piano and strummed guitar shoegaze melancholia, the penultimate, echoingly sung steady slow walking rhythm ‘Happiness’ is about gaining wisdom and a return to self, the culmination of growth into self-reliant autonomy, where both sadness and happiness can co-exist, summed up in the lines “No one holds my happiness/No one pulls my happiness/My heart holds my happiness”.
Finally, stripped to just voice and piano, is the lullabying ‘Dream Away’, angelic voices backdropping a song in honour of a friend’s peaceful passing after a life well-lived and the journey into whatever lies ahead.
Coll says that “being human is not easy” but, while she and her music may be “slightly askew”, her lyrics often impressionistic and free floating, she is indeed, for all that, strangely in tune with the universal human heart.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.dianecoll.music.net
‘Tell Jupiter, Hi’:
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