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Having gained a fair amount of attention for her ethereal contributions to the Lightness of Peter and the Wolf’s songs, Dana Falconberry’s debut EP Paper Sailboat gives full exposure her talent, both vocally and in her remarkably versatile and poignant songwriting. Falconberry’s voice is an explosion of paradoxes: simultaneously passionate and reserved, seductive and defiant, light and heavy. These forces combine within the songs for a distinctively Southern flair, like a score to a Tennessee Williams play where desperation and pride intermingle into a haunted and yearning heritage.
Falconberry moved to Austin in 2005 from her home state of Arkansas after the collaborative release of Ten Birds on One Wire with Mark Shantz. And although Falconberry’s voice revels in the rural southern swoon of the “Natural State,” the six songs on Paper Sailboat are stamped with a timeless sincerity and beauty that defies a provincial insularity and meanders easily through folk, blues and even hints of earlier roots-jazz. Her distinctive accent is bewitching and resounds with a confident, crisp resilience that can capture heartbreak and determination in each note and that seems to balance Lucinda Williams’ raw power, Patty Griffin’s grace and Gillian Welch’s traditional sensibility – an impressive list to be sure, but one that Falconberry shows more than enough promise to live up to.
Paper Sailboat begins gently and unassumingly, a lazy whistle opening into the swaying sigh of “My Sweetheart, My Dear,” which carries the feel of a late summer’s heavy humidity drawn slowly through Red Hunter’s accordion. “When I said I wanted to be alone / I didn’t mean all on my own - I meant with you,” Falconberry confesses, before drowning in softly destressed pleads of “Don’t leave me here.” Falconberry’s subtle inflection helps keep the song from melodramatic heights, but such moments are also brilliantly balanced by tunes like the fiery and cutting “Leave In the Middle of the Night.” While Falconberry can encapsulate longing and heartbreak with a stunning poignancy, as on the title track or the haltingly wraithlike waltz of “Sophie”, it’s these more brazen moments (“Old Red Hat” being the other) that prove Falconberry’s songwriting and voice is substantial enough to grind soulfully beyond a coffeehouse simplicity.
The closing track, “Sadie,” is easily the EP’s most stunning. Having swept through a range of styles in the previous five songs, Falconberry seems to settle into “Sadie” the most comfortably. Patty Griffin contributes an elegant and august piano backing as Falconberry deftly moans into the narrative stance of a widower delivering a mournful treatise on love, loss and letting go. The name falls from Falconberry’s lips with an elongated grief, a bittersweet reckoning as the narrator stares across the barren fields declaring fatefully, “I loved her so / I let my horses go / over the hill, Sadie.” The song magnificently caps an altogether stirring and honest album, with Paper Sailboats establishing Falconberry’s premiere position among young Austin artists and a voice that should be heard by everyone.
Websites:
www.danafalconberry.com
Myspace
