(2022) May Erlewine - Tiny Beautiful Things
Review:
May Erlewine‘s Tiny Beautiful Things is named after the book by Cheryl Strayed, which comprises a selection of intimate letters between total strangers. The latest album from the Michigan singer-songwriter is a collection of songs focused on the power of connection and the emotional exchanges surrounding love. Easy opens with a puttering drum pattern and repeated tinkling piano notes, her voice rising and falling on a song of self-doubt and the confusion about “All I didn’t do right/All I didn’t do wrong/All that I didn’t like/All that I didn’t own” and about owning mistakes made when love goes wrong, Theo Katzman’s guitar solo adding extra colour midway. Another piano ballad but of more contemplative mien, Changing continues the album’s theme of loss, how connections need choices and of the courage to let go and move on (“I would rather go there willing/then drag the feet of dread/And of all the things worth holding/There’s little that I need/I’ll take the love I carry/The rest I cannot keep”). Indeed, the loss of love and its impact on confidence informs a significant part of the album. On A Hunger, backed by rippling guitar and violin, she sings about “The great wreck of the rubble I’m stumbling in” and asks, “Will I ever love the way I loved you then/Will I ever know that love I knew again” wondering “Is time the savior or the beast?/As I watch the years pull apart my grief/Tearing at the better part of me/gnawing on the bones of my belief”. And again, returning to the piano, opening with almost morse code-like notes, Your Someone finds her declaring, “I left my love in a past life/I even slammed the door…I left my heart at the altar/I left it all in the ring/Was I fighting the good fight?/Or fighting everything”, but the glow of tenderness within has her succumbing, summoning up the chorus “I wanna love you in all your pieces/I wanna stare right into your sun/I wanna watch you grow, I wanna know you/I wanna be your someone”. A switch of focus, written for her daughter, Lionheart, with its pulsing cello, is about the love and hope we have for our children (“You are needed in a world gone wrong/In the long dark night…you’ve got to use your wings, child/Let them carry you beyond the times”), with herself as “the mountain/Something you can see/When home is hard to find”. The positivity continues with the rippling fingerpicked and cascading piano He Knows, its crystal stream folksiness evoking Nanci Griffith) and perhaps Gentle On My Mind), a song of unconditional love between two people (“You can tell by her crooked smile she’s living well/You can tell by her hands she’s been through hell/You can tell by her eyes she’s been up all night/You can tell by the way he loves her, that it’s alright”) that keeps them together. But then the mood shifts again with the desperately sad, slow, piano-heavy Could Have Been where relationships end (“There in the sun rise/I saw you change your mind/It cast a different light on me…So I’m learning to fall apart”), a song about disappointment and grief partly fuelled by the way the pandemic brought an end to so many dreams, ending with the heartbreaking line “What did you gain from naming the pain in me?” And yet, throughout, while there may be hurt and loss, there’s never recrimination, but rather a sense of gratitude for what was while it was, as on Worlds Apart where, while remembering a former lover, she says, “I wish I could turn back the clocks/To the times that I’m missing/All of the moments I talked/When I could have listened” the essence is about how love remains (“I loved you first when we met/And I love you still just the same…If words could travel that far/I would send a thousand I love yous/To live in your heart”. Love is, as the album title says, about those Tiny Beautiful Things, about learning to live with imperfections in a relationship (the opening lines come from Anne of Green Gables), of learning to own our mistakes and take the fall, and in the face of everything defiantly declaring “Whatever hell it brings/I’m going after love”. And so it ends with the six-minute reflective, meditative piano, strings-swept Brought Me To You, which, simply put, is about how everything we experience in matters of the heart, the mistakes made and the connections we forge (“All of the places I’ve loved and left/All of the secrets I never kept/All of the bridges I wanted to burn/And the lessons that I have not learned”) make us who we are and the life we live and share, as she quietly says “I wouldn’t change a thing…For all of these things/Brought me to you”. An alluring and beautifully sung album about the timeless vicissitudes and valedictions of love, May Erlewine’s Tiny Beautiful Things understands the heart and soothes the hurt, ultimately echoing that, as a certain band once avowed, love is all there is. — folkradio
Track List:
01 - Easy (feat. Theo Katzman)
02 - Changing
03 - A Hunger
04 - Your Someone
05 - Lion Heart
06 - He Knows
07 - Could Have Been
08 - Worlds Apart (feat. Theo Katzman)
09 - Tiny Beautiful Things
10 - Brought Me to You
Media Report:
Genre: americana, folk
Country: Michigan, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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