Written by: Dave Cantrell
Fresh from her accomplished exploration into her longstanding obsession with Brazilian music (2014’s lush – and lustrous – Floresta; see SEM’s review here), Mia Doi Todd returns to her native LA for an exceptionally well-knit collection of nine English-language covers that toe an astutely delicate line between devotional homage and free-spirited interpretation, succeeding in the process at producing a coherent piece of work that honors both impulses with a nuanced confidence.
While seeming a random selection, the tracks on Songbook all echo with a particular resonance for Ms Todd. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” a lucid reading of the Neil Young standard that hangs suspended here in a gently swirling liquid amber, and mid-album track “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?,” one of Sandy Denny’s most signature tunes dipped in light Jamaican rhythms, its intimate fatalism made more playful and thereby somehow starker, have both been part of the singer’s live repertoire for years. A couple others – a bossa nova take on the songwriter’s songwriter Ned Doheny’s “A Love of Your Own,” the plaintive inevitability of Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game given a ruefully effervescent spark – speak to Todd’s Southern California roots, while TV on the Radio’s “Careful You,” brought in this version more toward the cabaret continentalism that the Sitek-Adebimpe troupe maybe intended but shied away from (those kids and their electronics), was picked up fairly recently when seeing TVotR live, and her “Between the Bars” has a Twin Peaks chill to it that unexpectedly renders Elliott Smith’s original 2 AM glow more welcoming. All share a softly assured radiance and a sanguine grace and add significantly to the loose-leaf concept of a kind of musical autobiography this album is meant to convey, but it’s the reimagining of a handful of childhood favorites that, aside from making a certain someone feel even a tad bit older than he already thought he was, truly shine, imbued as they are with the luminous charm of that sustained reminiscence.
“Close To Me” – stripped down, sparkling, acoustic – is slowed to its essence, possessing a bright calm that suggests it was written first thing in the morning but in any case bares a sighing, conflicted reticence that might make Robert Smith wince, its arrangement that naked and true. Similarly, the poignancy of its inclusion notwithstanding (Songbook was conceived and recorded well before 2016 added Prince to its grim toll), “When Doves Cry,” given a rich reductivist treatment, shimmers with trembling sure emotion, its sumptuous bass-driven atmospherics, stippled by husband (and primary producer, with Money Mark and Dustin Bowlin) Jeremy Peterson’s ticking pizzicato guitar, prioritizing the song’s tough vulnerability ahead of its surging pop-rush dynamics, to the point in fact it’s difficult to imagine a more effective cover of it including Patti Smith’s, while “Pancho & Lefty,” though provided a more straightforward interpretation – the song’s stature and structure, one imagines, discourages it being too overly messed with – benefits nonetheless from the singer’s innately moving timbre, its coupling of glassy resilience and steady warmth, the shining quaver when necessary, bringing a pitch-perfect narrative sympathy to Townes Van Zandt’s immortal tale.
And right there of course is the common currency floating through all of this, Mia Doi Todd’s soaringly clear, unbreakably fragile voice, an instrument with a tensile lilt that might well know no limits. Great as these songs are, as crack as the team that was convened to realize them (add Alberto López, Jimmy Tamborello, John Herndon, Gabe Noel and Sam Gendel to those already mentioned), the reason you’ll keep coming back to Songbook is the singer selling them. They seem well beyond the realm of classics to her and more pure commodities of the heart.
Songbook available via iTunes or Amazon
