natalie jane hill
photo by Charlie Boss
Natalie Jane Hill’s new record, Hopeful Woman, is composed of slender songs, life-sized, in which humans endeavor to reconcile themselves to wildernesses and cities; rearrange their rooms and open windows to be closer to the world outside and its choruses of frogs and crickets; attempt and fail to reach one another across a kitchen table; weather natural disaster. If something we might deign to call self-discovery emerges over the course of these narratives, it owes in no small part to the scale of their scenes, to the modesty of their ambitions, in which tumult and adaptation and growth are metabolized through a body’s gentle actions and reactions, its moments of quietude and observation and reflection. “Into the current of life I will fly,” Hill sings on Oranges, a song that would serve her well as a mission statement. “Changing and loving and growing and trying.”
Hopeful Woman was recorded live in two parts: first in Lockhart, Texas—she’s a native of the state—and then in Western North Carolina, where she now makes her home. She enlisted a small ensemble of collaborators whose spacious but focused arrangements hum with the nuance and delicacy that has attended the recordings of another thoughtful Texas songwriter, the great Edith Frost. Hill’s crackerjack multi-instrumentalist partner Mat Davidson in particular appears throughout with preternatural grace: attend to his aching pedal steel on “Never Left Me,” or demurely pastoral-psychedelic flute that weaves through “Lucky to Be,” or the stacked fiddles on “Blue is the Color of My Sun.” All is in deft service to Hill’s magnificent voice, redolent of Hope Sandoval or Karen Dalton but more humane, more sturdy, closer to the earth.
It’s only close to the earth where hope takes root and, we can only hope, grows—not in reckless, wild fecundity but in measured steps, one at a time, while the storm gathers, rips through, passes. “And I know through time we’ll give and we’ll let go,” Hill sings. “And I know this time I’ll give and I’ll let go.” Hers is a wise and humane hopefulness, built exquisitely to human scale. The same can be said of this record
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