Premiere: Cricket Blue’s “June” , Spellbinding Storytelling
Photo credit: Isaac Wasuck
Songwriters can get caught in the mix of making a song too personal or even, try to make it not personal at all so others can relate. When asked the question about their new single, ‘June‘, Cricket Blue‘s Taylor Smith tells us, “Actually, not really! The song’s not about me and it’s wholly fictional; June and Jack aren’t one-to-one pseudonyms for anyone real“. Sometimes songs and stories just pour out of people in beautiful ways and the beautiful, harmony laden track from the Vermont duo spins a web that reads more like an evocative novel than a song. The band has a way with words in that manner.
And it’s using those devices in how successful they are able to present a full story in just a few minutes of song. Bookending the tale with intro and conclusion. Smith continued about the track, “I feel like the juxtaposition of the first and last lines of the song really defines it: starting with “I’m reaching out again, but not to ask you ‘round” and ending with “when you have some afternoon, come and see your June.” That’s the whole song — she starts out insisting to herself (and Jack) that she’s the one who’s “fine” with their breakup; she’s being the bigger person by reaching out, but warns him not to read into it too much. By the end, she’s inadvertently put all the power back in his hands — if it’s not too much trouble, please pay attention to me. That’s fairly sad. I hope she’ll be okay later though. This song is just one moment.” The song is just one moment. That is kind of a brilliant way in looking at music in general. You can lose yourself in it for a bit and it can stick with you or you can shake it off. But the inherent beauty of the occasionally melancholy, yet subtly jubilant sounds that Taylor Smith and Laura Heaberlin craft together are difficult to shake.
With a golden guilding on their voices and instrumentation reminiscent of The Milk Carton Kids or perhaps an all too overused comparison to Simon & Garfunkel, there is a softness, an almost whisper that floats in their delivery. Buoyant vocal lines lingering along side plucked strings and ebbing waves of sound that rise and fall. Heaberlin’s voice entering in a subtle fashion, but adding such a great deal to the totality of the sound emanating from your speakers. Taylor, steadfast in the delivery of the story of June. A story described by the band: The titular character writes a letter to her high school sweetheart who’s broken up with her. The song floats between June’s outward presentation — her tone vacillating between kind and mean-spirited as she maneuvers for the moral high ground — and her inner monologue, where she frets about her purity and self-image in the wake of her loss.
And its perhaps that quote right there which makes the music of these two artists so wonderful. Because in listening to this song, before even reading that explanation, the feeling, the emotion, the story is evident in just their arrangement choices and how they choose their audible aesthetics for the song. There is inner turmoil and a sense of discordance, a building up of tension at points that flows and moves underneath their voices. You can sense the stressing and release throughout the song, and as Smith describes it “floating between” how this character presents themselves to the outer world and the struggle that she is feeling internally.
A pair of brilliant artists whose collective voice is far greater than the sum of their singular parts. There are artists in todays landscape who write songs, but few who craft them in a way that presents them as something more than just melody and words. Songwriters whose writing plays out equally as well inside the cover of a book as they do in gorgeously sung harmonies and their forthcoming full length album is more of the same.
Serotinalia is slated for release on May 10th. Keep an eye out at http://cricketbluemusic.com/
