Reviews

Rita Bliss
Album: One More Winter
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.ritabliss.com/

Wearing her Austin, Texas, heart on her sleeve and carrying a banjo on her arm, compared to Johns Hartford and Prine, queer country star Bliss draws deep from the bluegrass and old school country well for her sophomore album that features Noah Jeffries on fiddle and Billy Bright on mandolin. She opens with 'Come Along', a banjo bubbling invitation to visit her adopted home state "Where the armadillos roam/And the hills will take you home". The bounce continues with 'All My Days', a love song that charts a relationship from its first stirrings (" I was just sitting at a table in the corner feeling lonely as could be/Then you came along in your green t -shirt") to a permanent partnership ("now we're out here planting in a little garden digging up the dirt") and comfortable domesticity ("tomorrow's a day that'll be like the others/When I tell you that I'll see you that night and you pull up the covers/I'll go off to work and you'll go for a long walk /Then I'll come home and I'll listen and you'll listen and we'll talk") as she pledges "I'll give you all my days till this life is over/And I'll leave you all my money when I'm dead and gone". Sparsely arranged with just banjo and harmonica, 'Sometimes She Sings' is another tender love song to the same subject ("She likes wearing sweaters/She likes cabins in the woods /She drinks the fanciest tea/And thinks mustard is good /And sometimes she sings so softly /Just under her breath").

With plucked banjo, trading solos with fiddle in the instrumental break, 'Aimlessly' conjures another idyllic vision as the seasons pass ("It's October again/You're swaying in the porch swing/I'm walking through the yard /You're makin' us some sweet tea/I'm workin' on the car?You're goin' out for groceries/I'm fixin' up the door").

Bliss is originally from Rochester, New York, and 'Honey' with its harmonica solo is an autobiographical confessional of her life so far and the rocky road she's travelled ("Once I was a child and I ran away from home/Everything I carried became everything I owned…Once I had a habit that cost everything I had/Every day I emptied every twenty dollar bag /And I tried, and I tried/To raise up my white flag/But only when, when I'd lost everything I had") , finally finding peace in a steady relationship ("now I take the sweet things that might come along my way …You say you're here to stay/Honey you're the sweetest thing to come along my way").

Her past is also at the heart of the tenderly melancholic, Prine-like 'Empty Houses' and pining for what was (" I didn't see that last day coming/I didn't know the end was near") and the memories that linger ("I wonder if that fence is holding/If someone else is keeping up the lawn …Now I think sometimes in the stillness /Of that same thread running through us /And I wish I'd kept some souvenir"). 'Some Say' is a more upbeat, musically and lyrically, number about the aphorisms and adages that get trotted out and how valid they may be in the face of actual life ("Some say absence makes a heart grow fond/But they don't know how far you've gone") but how nevertheless "

Some say there's a heaven, if you act real good/I say it isn't so, but you still should". Kicking off with banjo, to be joined by guitar, bass, fiddle and mandolin, 'The Highway' is a playful song about conflicting feelings ("I don't like a cold rain, or a bitter wind/You don't like the ocean and want summer just to end/You don't like the highway when the city's going home/I don't like a one-lane bridge or a dusty gravel road") and compromise and meeting halfway ("I don't like to sweep up, you don't like a dirty floor/So I will take my boots off if you will get the door").

The final two tracks are both character rather than autographically driven, 'Red', with banjo, mandolin and fiddle solos, a scampering story of a small town disruptor ("She leaves trouble in her wake/She's trouble just for trouble's sake") who starts out stealing pennies and proceeds to safe-cracking and grand theft auto but whose mother "still yells out the door /Sayin' 'Red you come on home/Oh Red don't let me die alone'".

It ends, the only track featuring drums, with the slow bluegrass, fiddle-aching trot of 'Silver City', from whence the album title comes, the story of a disillusioned miner's life in New Mexico and his lament for time wasted ("I remember when the water rose and met the rooftops/The dance hall and the jailhouse washed away/Some went to El Paso /They all said that I should go/Back to Texas or up north to Santa Fe/I don't want to spend my life in Silver City/Not when there's so little left to spend"). Her debut album was called 'Peaches and Apple Pies', this adds the cream. Absolute Bliss.

Mike Davies

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