Dori Freeman - Every Single Star (2019)

Having recently provided backing vocals for her octogenarian grandfather Willard Gayheart’s debut album (reviewed here), still based in the same Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Freeman returns with the follow-up to 2017’s Letters Never Read. During the interim, she’s become a mother (band drummer Nick Falk, is her husband), something that clearly informs the music, if not necessarily in the lyrics (though several are about her daughter while others draw on friends or fictional female characters) but certainly in the more laid-back, easy-rolling feel.

Again working with Teddy Thompson in the producer’s seat and who also joins her on a duet, recorded in the span of just five days it’s informed by the music of Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, both of whom she’d been listening to in the run-up.

However, while she may have found domestic contentment, it doesn’t mean she can’t still turn her hand to songs about being spurned, case in point being All I Ever Wanted, which evokes Ronstadt’s cover of Blue Bayou, as she sings “would you listen to me while I’m talking to you/No. I’m not that hard to satisfy/All I ever wanted was a decent man to give a damn and try”. Then there’s the piano-backed Go On tale of a self-absorbed lover as she declares “don’t try to fake it like you just meant good/Just like that little heart inside your chest/You’ll always do whatever serves you best /Go on get out of my hair”.

Those marching orders are also duly filed on the airy melody of Walls Of You And Me in a relationship where “you kept me a secret to your friends” and it’s now “time to tear it down, burn it to the ground”.

However, come the waltzing Darlin’ Boy, it’s a case of surrendering to the inevitable, so that while she may tell her rambling, gambling lover to get along because “your love will never be true”, come the last verse, despite “knowing for certain that you’ll pull the curtain and only in tears will it end” she admits “I swore I’d fight and never invite it/But I can’t deny it no more”.

Having surrendered, much here is about being with those she loves or how she feels when she’s not, the latter exemplified in the easy-rolling opening number, That’s How I Feel “One shoe on the side of the road/One bag in the wind blowing cold”) and reinforced by the Buddy Hollyish country-pop of Like I Do (“Til I had a little baby, I never knew that I could love someone like you”).

Hubbie gets a specific reference too in the lightly tumbling rhythms of Another You where, romance in mind, she’s singing about “begging we go on the road/Sharing the state and the same postal code… singing like sirens and chasing the blues”.

As someone once said, the best part of breaking up is making up, and hence 2 Step, where Thompson joins her for a duet as parted lovers get back together on the dance floor to a classic old school country twosome before the album ends on another maternal note and another Ronstadt echo with I’ll Be Coming Home, a song about having to leave the kid behind go and make a living.

It’s been said that being happy is the death blow to artistic creation, especially as a songwriter, but Freeman is ample testament that a swelling heart can produce songs every bit as good as a broken one.