Jemima James - When You Get Old
Jemima James’ album from Team Love
Records, When You Get Old, has been released with a companion piece, her thirty
seven year old intended debut At Longview Farm. It’s instructive to compare the
two albums. Both albums have a lot of musical credibility they derive from
their command of traditional American music, but they put that knowledge to
work in distinctly different ways. At Longview Farm is a product of its era
more so than When You Get Old – besides the fact that there’s a bevy of
instrumentation employed on the first album that is missing from her follow-up,
the production wholeheartedly encourages listeners to hear both works as
emerging from completely different contexts. At Longview Farm’s ten tracks are
musically substantive, but they are also clearly geared for radio play. The
thirteen songs on When You Get Old, however, have a sound and approach that
signals they were truly written and recorded for no one else by Jemima James.
She presents them in such a way, however, that those who share her tastes will
find it well night impossible to not admire them as well.
She opens When You Get Old with its
title song. While there’s a wealth of autobiographical musings in this song,
there’s an abundance of humor as well. It isn’t jokey or punch-line oriented;
instead, James conveys the darker humor of the piece through her vocal delivery
and phrasing. The music has a deceptively light-hearted bounce as well that
belies the song’s more serious subtext. She uses organ on “Magician” to further
flesh out the color in its quasi-waltz time arrangement, but it is her voice
and lyrical content working with the arrangement that really makes this song a
success. The sleepy slide guitar stretching out over the even-tempered shuffle
fueling “If I Could Only Fly” underplays the yearning at the heart of this
song, but James really does well with weaving seemingly contrasting elements in
a song into something lucid and credible.
The tempo picks up some on “If It’s the
End” and some of the darker humor present in songs like the title cut returns
here. James gives this song a much straighter delivery than the earlier track
and the music certainly doesn’t attempt approximating or exceeding the
jauntiness of the first song, but the sighing with a smile resignation in the
lyrics is difficult to ignore. Harmony vocals make a significant contribution
to When You Get Old and few songs benefit more from their use than “Bats in the
Belfry”. The same lazy bluesy feel surrounding the earlier “If I Could Only
Fly” is strengthened further on the song “One and Only” along with some
tasteful brush drumming that gives the track a consistent, but never
overpowering, pulse. James ends When You Get Old with “Nothing New” which
somehow manages to be a little moodier than the earlier songs while still
affirming life before she exits. It is, for all intents and purposes, a solo
performance sans any sort of double-tracked or harmony vocals and, like the
rest of this album, James carries it off with subtlety and panache.
9 out of 10 stars
Shannon Cowden
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