Tara Jane O’Neil - Tara Jane O’Neil
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Tara Jane O’Neil
Tara Jane O’Neil
[Gnomonsong; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
I was walking up a mountain the first time I heard Tara Jane O’Neil’s new self-titled collection of songs. It felt odd to hike with headphones on, but my mood that afternoon made music seem necessary. For the whole weekend, my mind had been, in Pat Beane’s words, “buzzing with noise and nothing-anxiety.” I thought some songs might help, and I started to climb, letting the album’s tempo set my speed up the trail. We took a contemplative pace. The recordings were alive, I felt, fading in and out of focus. As I took the highest switchback, a phrase from “Purple,” a rhetorical question, arrived like an outstretched hand: “Can you feel how near you are?” And as I reached the top of the mountain, “Blow” began, each of its bass notes glowing as it entered. That song is the album’s single, as in singular, as in strangely beautiful. The lookout was tranquil, and I took a photo of it. The songs seemed to absorb the vista, their embers sustained underneath the settling dusk.
The second time I heard the songs, I was on a long-distance train when it staggered to a stop. In a lull between tracks, I heard the border patrol agent approach the people behind me, demanding their passports. “What were you doing abroad?” he asked them. “Traveling,” they answered. “I know you were traveling,” he replied. “But what were you traveling for?” Their reply was inaudible to me: at that moment, the refrain of “Cali” rose through my mix, on which O’Neil sings of “the sound after all the maps had burned,” an enchanting notion. As the train began to move again, I wondered whether her careworn poems came first or their melodies. As if I or anyone could know, I stared out the window, fields expanding as we went, and thought of Maggie Nelson’s vignette in Bluets about “a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety.” Nelson recently called O’Neil’s music “an occasion for ecstatic dispossession.” It took her about 25 years of listening to O’Neil’s songs, she wrote, for them to “emerge into plainer sight.”
The third time I heard the songs, I was preparing lunch in my kitchen with the stereo on, the windows thrown open. Guitar lines, their contours sturdy if of hairline width, kept catching on breezes, drawing all the spaces in the world together. Uncertain what exactly to listen for, I measured out olive oil by tablespoon. “The path forward is well-lit,” O’Neil sang on “Metta.” I thought about how the symbolists considered music a form of flight, to which poetry should aspire, even though Plato thought music came from poetry, poiesis meaning creation of any kind. With tiny movements, I shook soil off the basil, I splashed water into my teacup, and O’Neil sang about stars exploding inside her ribcage. Spring came in the window, the songs went out, and still I haven’t heard them right.
Pitchfork 75
Tara Jane O’Neil, the one-time bassist for the Kentucky math-rock band Rodan, has made nine solo records under her own name since 2000. In a 2014 interview with Fact, O’Neil remarked, “I’m not writing confessional singer-songwriter stuff, but I do think that my life informs the music I make.” Three years later, she has embraced the “singer-songwriter” label, at least according to the press release penned by her friend and author Maggie Nelson, but Tara Jane O’Neil isn’t really a confessional. Instead, the album whittles away some of 2014’s Where Shine New Lights’ experimental ambience and places O’Neil’s voice and lyrics in the spotlight. The result is a slow-burning record whose warmth stretches across its 11 track like the sun crosses the sky.
Tara Jane O’Neil requires a certain amount of attention, otherwise its unhurried beauty can get lost. Details matter here. In some places, you can see a clear line to O’Neil’s darker, earlier work. Opener “Flutter” begins with traces of Where Shine New Lights’ ghostly tremors thanks to James Elkington’s spooky eerie pedal steel playing. A haunted feeling lingers through the earlier part of the record as O’Neil sings of “the sun, a black star,” “ghost breath,” and “graves and jewels.” The woozy trumpet of “Sand” could soundtrack a spirit’s waltz across dunes; “Let the flow and the coyote lead you/Let the moon be in the morning sky, blue/Let there be another in the making,” she sings on the celestial “Joshua.” The restorative power of nature has been an abiding trait of O’Neil’s music, but here the instruments and lyrics seem more intertwined than ever.
But Tara Jane O’Neil really takes flight in its center, when songs open up and turn brighter. O’Neil’s soft voice and the quivering guitar offer a feeling of blissful peace, as she touches on love (the upbeat “Laugh”) and unity (the euphoric “Kelley”). And then there’s the standout track “Cali,” an anecdote about folk’s favorite subject. “You called me California true bird,” O’Neil sings in a moody, minimal drawl. It would be too easy to say that O’Neil resembles Joni Mitchell here, but “Cali” truly does contain the windswept contentment. On these tracks, O’Neil’s voice conveys the light strength and easygoing introspection of Judee Sill and Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon compatriot David Crosby. After these moments, Tara Jane O’Neil’s sun begins to set as it moves again into a bookending coolness.
These songs ask for nothing more than patience, attention, and a willingness to submit to a lush idyllic. They lack structural tension and contain few, if any, surprises. Because of this, there is not too much to pick apart. O’Neil presents first-person narratives, and as a listener, we are left peering through a small window into her internal world. But while remaining as obtuse as ever, O’Neil’s newfound appreciation for singer-songwriter-dom presents some of her most personal work yet.