Laura Cantrell: Bees
[purchase]
From Laura Cantrell's absolutely stunning penultimate effort Humming By The Flowered Vine comes one of the saddest, most poignant piano ballads I know, its performance simultaneously majestic and bittersweet, with a masterful warbling production dynamic that hums like a hive. The song -- which gave the album its title -- never fails to project me towards an imagined life's end, my community and companions gone, the world reduced to a set of lifeless streets.
The multitalented singer-songwriter, cover artist, feminist, and radio DJ Cantrell is nominally a country singer, but like so much of her work, this song is perfect popfolk, storied and universal, wistful and tender, soft and lush with memory. If this is county, I guess I'm a fan after all.