Music obsessives and “regular” folks alike know of the song/memory retrieval phenomenon — you hear a song and instantly remember where you were the first time you heard it. The speed and clarity of detail associated with the song can be quite amazing. There have been claims that odors produce even stronger connections. This is almost true for me, but not quite.
Whenever I hear Supertramp’s “Give A Little Bit,” I’m right back in my buddy’s parents’ Chevy Nova, enjoying those last few moments of a 1977 summer romance, feeling that I just might die if time is allowed to roll forward. We held onto each other to keep from falling off the earth. We didn’t know that our desire went against the laws of love’s physics. The youthful mind is like that.
When listening to singer/songwriter Debbie Miller’s Fake Love, I’ve been getting this odd sense of déjà vu. The thing is, there’s no way I’ve heard these songs before. Heck, she doesn’t even necessarily remind me of other singers (beyond the occasional toned-down Amanda Palmer/Regina Spektor thing), and yet I can feel a kind of familiar pull. What is it?
Well, most of this album is about relationships, musings about their formation and dissolution. That can be pretty much standard fare in the folkish world, but Miller is able to get at the pure emotional threads that draw all of this together: the disappointment, the longing, the joy. Her voice is quite malleable, going from an intimate whisper to a crisp, beautiful trill. Miller’s presentations, running from the cute staccato jaunt of the title track to the acoustic introspection of “I Rise” to the piano & cello ache of “Made You”, manage to seem lush even when they’re actually simple arrangements. To my ears, that’s no trick. It’s instead a sign that all of me has become involved in the story.
The involvement isn’t purely serious though, especially when you get to songs like “F Train” (about the dreaded drunken hookup) and the endearing “Lite-Brite,” which draws a parallel (in a funny stream of consciousness sort of way) between objects and people. What’s great about the “less serious” songs is the delicious collision between the light musical setting and the pointed lyric. While I would like to say that the hilarious bonus track sealed it for me, the truth is that she had me on the opening “Tippy Toe” when the protagonist is elated that she never runs into any other girls in the object of her desire’s mind — “…which is good because I would beat them up“. Those last five words are whispered into the listener’s right ear. It’s a perfect pop moment.
But the connection? That sense that I had been here before? On “I Rise,” Miller tells the story of the distilled joy that can only come from a relationship heading in the right direction. When her voice soars, it brought to mind what I went through all of those years ago, when I was innocent to think that nothing could go wrong from that moment on. You might think that any love song can do this, but my ears tell me otherwise…and the rest of me is remembering things that have been kept in storage for a long, long time.
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