Midweek Music Break: Lizzy Ross Band, “Waves”

How do you put together your music playlists — the casual, randomized, no-occasion playlists, the non-obvious playlists (not “Oldies,” “Blues,” etc.) — the ones you listen to when you’re not trying to “send a message” or serve some particular purpose (like writing/editing music)?

Myself, I don’t like to think too much about the decision (other than to pull music from non-conflicting genres). So I tend to gather up a bunch of songs with related words in their titles. I’ve got a “Road Music” playlist, for example — it’s surprising (or not) how many song titles mention thoroughfares of one kind or another. And one of my favorite such playlists is the one called “Water Music.” What’s it include? Pretty much any song, in nearly any genre but classical, whose title references water in any form: oceans, rivers, rain, snow and ice, teardrops…

With no hesitation on my part, today’s selection went straight to the Water Music list. It’s by the Lizzy Ross Band, a North Carolina-based loose-genred group whose first album, Read Me Out Loud, came out just a few weeks ago.

The band is fronted by Lizzy Ross herself, a diminutive early-20s-something songwriter and vocal pyrotechnician. (That’s her over at the right, obviously, belting out something or other at a live performance.) While her voice is capable of great power, she modulates it superbly, mixing up sweet, unforced little grace notes with rocking bursts which channel mature, big-voice singers from other generations. While she doesn’t yet have a Wikipedia page, it’s not hard to find her mentioned online in the same breath with Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Edie Brickell, Joni Mitchell…

I have to admit I was charmed, too, by a little irrelevant detail I found while rummaging about on the Web for information about her and the band: she recently attended a “Beowulf themed Xmas party.” In decades of attending parties of all kinds, hosted by all manner of creative people, I have never seen — never expected to see — those proper nouns in the same sentence.

Given that voice and its magnetic appeal, it’s kind of exciting to listen to Ross’s band: the whole ensemble plays that well together, so seamlessly that they seem to have been doing this for years. They’re perfectly well-suited to one another.

And then there’s “Waves” itself:

I first heard it (not surprisingly) at Beat Surrender. The swinging rhythm immediately grabbed me, and of course there was Ross’s voice skipping above it. But I completely fell for the lyrics. If you read them apart from the music, you might wonder what sort of tune could possibly carry them; they seem almost like free verse, like prose: a peculiar sort of prose, a prose furnished wall-to-wall with metaphor and little stylistic flourishes uncommon to much of rock music. It’s a cleverly constructed song, and (I think) an honest pleasure to listen to.

[Below, click Play button to begin Waves. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:24 long.]

[Lyrics]