Caley Conway - Partner (2024)

There are moments in Caley Conway’s latest album, Partner, when the ever-busy Milwaukee singer-songwriter finds herself caught in the humdrum duties of daily life. There are things to do—or not—people to see—or not—and the ones and zeros of technology to attend to. And then, suddenly, she’s off and dreaming, belly laughing with a distant friend or considering taking up “the work of birds.” When she comes back down to Earth, more often than not, she finds bliss in a comforting middle ground. “There aren’t enough hours in the day, I’ve counted,” Conway sings early in the record, before slyly adding, “For loving you.”

Dreams, and the sometimes lovely, sometimes painful realities that anchor them, are subjects Conway knows a thing or two about. The past decade has found her cutting a constant but elusive figure in the Milwaukee music scene and beyond, sharing local stages with Field Report and Julia Blair, sharing national stages with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, and releasing a steady stream of stellar solo work. 2021’s Bliss Or Bust featured three tracks of wry, head-in-the-clouds indie folk. Only A Dark Cocoon, released in late 2022, untangled Joni Mitchell’s classic “The Last Time I Saw Richard” and reconfigured it into three original songs of hazy and jazz-inflected post-rock. Dusty country ballads and cheeky odes to cheese populate the discography margins.

Partner is Conway’s first full-length release since 2019’s Surrounded Middle. It’s wonderful to hear her luxuriate in the space afforded by these ten gorgeous and deliberately paced tracks, escaping reality one minute and tussling with the physical the next. Opener “Heart Of Liquid” finds the singer jittery with “caffeine and screen time.” The droll “Hours In The Day” opens with a frazzled Conway “falling out the door and hurtling toward Sheboygan,” before catching some much-needed dreamtime. Closer “Unforgettable” leaves the first-person perspective behind and instead follows a family enjoying a day in the park. “Unforgettable, that day was unforgettable,” Conway sings, capturing the moment before it drifts away.

All throughout is Conway’s arresting voice and enigmatic delivery. Her voice toggles between airy and light (“Sky Blue,” “Unforgettable”) and honeyed and warm (“Love Is Sex,” “Into The Screen Door”). Her delivery is conversational, close, and intimate, giving seemingly offhand lines like “I’m sure it’s nothing” the texture of a casually shared secret. “No one says it better than the Beatles, do they? / My independence seems to vanish in the haze” Conway muses/quotes on “Hours In The Day.” It feels like dropping in, midstream, on someone’s internal monologue.

The push and pull of nature and the synthetic animates much of Partner. “Sky Blue” paints an impressionistic landscape “in periwinkle and oxygen,” a scene full of yellow finches and flocks of geese and Conway herself, “ruby-throated, all of my powers sugar.” The nostalgic “Mazzy” revels in the humid and sun-soaked air of childhood summers. On the other end of the nature-tech spectrum, “Avatar” grapples with the anxieties of the endless digital scroll, with Conway casting herself as her own virtual stand-in and finding existential dread in a cursor on an empty search bar. “Heart Of Liquid” spills over with robot hearts, formulas, and worries. “I know it’s nothing but a password,” Conway frets. “Any idiot can speak friend and enter.”

Recorded and realized in both Conway’s spare bedroom studio and Milwaukee’s increasingly invaluable Silver City Studios, Partner hums with the sound of some of the city’s finest musicians. Drummer Devin Drobka, upright bass player Barry Clark, harmony vocalist Ellie Jackson, and others flesh out Conway’s compositions and fold them into unexpected shapes. Nothing stands still for long, and even straightforward genre exercises often take off-kilter musical (and lyrical) turns. “Into The Screen Door” begins with a beautifully plucked acoustic guitar and Conway lamenting “You have a vision you don’t see me in.” By song’s end, though, Drobka’s brushed drums are skipping across the surface in erratic patterns and Conway is coming to a realization. “I think you’ve paid up, I was the coward,” she admits.

Those looking for a single song that captures Partner’s pulse need look no further than the incredible “Singing Never.” A steady synth beat and Conway’s twinkling omnichord open the curtains on an early-morning scene of drowsy pleasure. “The morning buzzes in, stinging / But I’m sleeping selfishly with you,” she sings, declaring it her “favorite thing to do.” Soon she’s “free and dreaming,” fertilizing the Earth like a bird and contemplating her “second-favorite thing to do”: singing. But then, incredibly, she jumps ahead decades and imagines herself in her nineties. She’s dying, losing her “love and gladness, aunts to cancer, nerve to madness.” It’s in this distant and final future that Conway offers up her life’s work—not for judgment, but for simple acceptance. “I’ll submit my work to them / When I am dead and resting / And singing never” she concludes.

Thankfully she’s not there yet. Here, then, is Partner, as well as Conway herself, in dreams and elsewhere, submitted for acceptance. Alive and restless and singing forever.