The break-up album could be its own genre of music, but these stories of severance can be told in many different ways. They can be as bombastic as Adele’s 21, as bitter as Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, or a furious exposing of dirty laundry in the style of last week’s Gaslighter by The Chicks.
The latest album from Phoenix singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews is the nicest kind: it’s quiet and still and unbearably sad, but somehow leaves the listener feeling better. No flowerpots hurled or suits scissored in half: it’s a soft closing of the door on her nine-year relationship and a firm stride towards whatever’s next. “Hope your days are even better than the ones that we shared,” she concludes over the muted organ of the closing song, Ships in the Night. Oh that we could all be so magnanimous.
It was recorded with just two other musicians — multi-instrumentalist Matthew Davidson and Big Thief drummer James Krivchenia — so there’s less going on behind her songbird vocals than on previous albums, such as her 2016 breakthrough Honest Life. It makes the times she edges away from classic Laurel Canyon-style balladry stand out more: the gradual distorting of the drums at the close of Carnival Dream, or the twinkling percussion that floats by during How You Get Hurt. The slow-building If I Told is among her finest compositions.
While it may have been written with an audience of one in mind — her ex — the power and grace of its sentiment is universal.
