As pitches for your new record go, Eleanor Friedberger’s was certainly different: “I hope that this album just sounds like an adult woman who’s OK, as boring as that sounds,” the former Fiery Furnaces singer said recently of her third solo album. New View takes its title partly from a grown-up relocation – Friedberger has moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York – and while it never sounds boring, the arrangements are undeniably trad. There are shades of Bob Dylan here (opener He Didn’t Mention His Mother even borrows the chord structure from Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door), while the beautifully understated Never Is a Long Time has the finger-picked warmth of an Iron and Wine song. But Friedberger’s offbeat delivery and lyrical quirks (“I’m opening a tree museum / It’s my new hobby,” she sings on Open Season; “And even if you had a twin / I wouldn’t notice her or him” is the touching sentiment of All Known Things) seem to balance nicely with this straightening out of the musical backdrop. New View is about a new home in more ways than one, then.
