Review of Jill Andrews's "The Mirror"

In my Saturday Songs post from July 30, I shared with you all a track with you by Jill Andrews, formerly of folk duo The Everybodyfields. Andrews’s first solo album, The Mirror, while not making a complete departure from the folk/country vibe of her previous band, pursues a more traditional singer-songwriter tack on her first solo effort, as evidenced in the single “The Mirror.”

Jill Andrews in concert; photo by Sean Russell via flickr.com

Both the songs as well as the literal mixing of those songs set Andrews’s excellent vocals front and center. There is some fine playing on the album, but only Andrews’s crooning gets true top billing. (Perhaps the male harmony vocals at the end of “Wake Up, Nico” could have been leveled up to Andrews, but that is minor complaint in a series of songs that values her voice.) Since we’re already talking about production values, it’s worth noting that the production values for the entire album are exceptional. Whether the song is a slow country shuffle like “Sinking Ship” or the more dynamic pop number “Blue Sky,” the songs are clean and never overwrought. The temptation, of course—if an artist has the means—is to include whatever he or she can. I always love when artists remember their roots and keep their recorded tracks simple. “A Little Less” mirrors exactly that philosophy, the song beginning with Andrews’s solo acoustic guitar and later providing the minor frills of subdued electric guitar lines, tambourine, and a lovely male voice (mixed low) in the background. The song needs nothing more than that.

In my earlier post, I noted how much I liked the lead single “The Mirror”: it has some clever lyrics (“I can look it up in a medical journal”), some effectively placed slide guitar, and an irresistible chorus. Having discovered the song not so long before my post, I didn’t have the chance to note that this song essentially owned my consciousness for a week; I hummed it to myself in class and tried to hit the notes in the shower.

Remarkably, “The Mirror” is not the album’s highlight. The most contagious song is easily “Another Man,” which is currently still bopping around my head. I would even go so far as to offer that “Another Man” is one of those songs that makes me want to play the piano. (“Brick” by Ben Folds Five is another; “Samson” by Regina Spektor is another.) The bouncy piano line running through the song is ecstatic and works especially well paired with Andrews’s unruffled vocals. Part of the song’s magic lies in how Andrews conveys the narrator’s sighing acceptance of her erstwhile lover. She delivers the lines “you’ve got a way of making things hard / and I’ve got a way of putting your things in the yard” with an aural roll of the eyes.

For me, the role of “Another Man” in the album is two-fold. Firstly, it demonstrates Andrews’s incredible potential as an intelligent pop-songwriter and performer. The obvious comparison is Sara Bareilles, who can produce a song like “Love Song,” which combines good songwriting with a difficult performing tone. But the other role of “Another Man” is a wake-up call. For me, the song is so good that the rest of the album has some difficulty in measuring up to it. That said, the song points to Andrews’s potential as a songwriter; I suspect there are even better tunes on the horizon.

~

Additionally, Jill Andrews’s album is currently available for free download on Noisetrade.com below. For those of you who are a) reaching this link too late to still download it or b) don’t want the entire album, for reasons I cannot understand, you can download “The Mirror” for free right below that.