When in no mood to be let down and annoyed by a studio sound that sometimes all but drowned her, I came perilously close to trashing Tara Angell.
Then she wouldn't be here since there's no point in writing about albums that leave me cold.
Angell gnawed at me with her debut, 'Come Down', released in February. She's talented and I couldn't work out exactly what sounded so wrong. That gave me an itch I wanted to scratch but couldn't reach.
How do you scratch your soul?
I could hear and appreciate the blood-and-guts honesty of 'Come Down' yet felt the music in several songs wasn't quite Tara, being too "muddy".
I began to think I must have a rare duff copy that caught her gift, then almost buried it when something went wrong with the sound.
As I puzzled, you got two entries. What I hear needs pulling together with trust in my ears and my intuition.
These faculties left me with a sense of unease and irritation at a CD that gave the lie to the Ryko label's assertion, made on Tara Angell's web site, that it "put the voice ahead of the music".
If only it did, more of the time, but that day's yet to come.
So what made for occasional self-indulgence on 'Come Down' combined with a banal musicianship lacking heart?
Tara pours her own heart out, even when it's been broken and hurt, and admiring fans love a toughness that keeps her going and sustains them with a very strong message.
A New York bartender, it seems Angell took out a huge loan to make a first record that was eating her up. She knows she's got a gift, she wants a career in music and she's hardened by life at 26. Some hear an album full of disappointment, but I wouldn't overdo it. I've been listening to a woman with no inclination to self-pity, too honest for self-indulgence and an absolute faith in music.
It's not just a money problem holding back a woman who's become a popular part of her city's musical scene. On stage, she's obviously a magnet. People are drawn back as I was by the album.
I can't be nearly as upbeat about 'Come Down' as Eric Danton at CDBaby, a site that's very attentive to new musicians, though his fine review has the sympathy characteristic of the place. In suggesting we listen to Tara's debut as a structured sequence, Eric has a good point, but it was irony, more than wit, I heard in stunts like having Angell record over a cocktail party for one of the tracks that does her no favours.
Bitch Please' (lyrics at Always on the Run just reminded somebody he rarely enjoy parties, eyeing up strangers, talking rubbish and enduring dull yacking until the hilarity sets in. Any familiar reader can guess my idea of a good party: a lucky encounter with a like mind and a quick escape. At parties, I often feel "trapped", hemmed in by conventions.
Once 'Come Down' was recorded, Tara got interviews and spoke of feeling "trapped" herself. Now I could make sense of the nagging contradictions on the album, feel my ears got it right and that self-indulgence with effects are no part of Angell's gift.
There's a hard-luck story told of how 'Come Down' came to be, the hassle for a bank loan, a meeting with producer Joseph Arthur, and a chemistry during five short days of recording on a tight budget: "Brooklyn bartender makes good."
A true tale -- as far as it goes -- makes Tara one in a thousand who had the guts to chase her heart's desire, just a variant on part of "the American dream". There it could end with a one-off and no more Tara Angell.
You have to go to her web site to find the sharing woman who's been facing up to her past and realities. Though it's left me with a minority view, I'd rather sense this about her with the qualities that help shape a true singer-songwriter.
Uninformative sleeve notes close with an "art photo" of a flaxen-haired woman snapped from behind on a grey day, clutching an umbrella in a graveyard full of ornate tombs. For what I was trying to catch, there was no help in tracks that might have been recorded in one of the sepulchres, so wretched is the sound.
 Like Eric, I heard how Tara's had "years of experience studying the great North American songwriters of the 20th century", but had to dig further and read several interviews to root out my real unease.
It's this.
Angell has a smoky voice for lyrics without pretension, she cracks with emotion and she comes across at her best with simplicity. So regardless of high praise from others for the studio technique and the chemistry with her producer, for me Arthur nearly disguised Tara herself.
One enthusiast, Australian Zak Black, writing at Amazon US, thinks "if there's any sense or justice in the music world, Tara Angell and Come Down will be received like saviours by all those who care about music." So she might and I've wound up rooting for her, but this is no album of the year.
There can be no doubt of Arthur's commitment: he's also present as multi-instrumentalist -- playing bass, keyboards, guitar, percussion and vocals. So what bugged me was his inability to leave alone and damage several songs by piling on the murk!
That's the last thing she needs, I felt ripped off.
There's nothing special about most of the musicians, who give a country sound to a few songs and do better than at first I could credit, but the often painful experiences Tara expresses are hard enough to sing well as it is.
Her stripped-down approach on the songs where she is more herself gets her likened to P.J. Harvey, but the latter has a real band that helps develop an imaginative range and it works.
'Come Down' isn't easy when plodding musicians sound as if they have no reason to be there and frankly just hold her back. That's wrong, along with the overkill that takes her only too literally when she sings about being "six feet under", left somehow to survive and crawl her way back out.
My confusion lifted with one look at the Tara of Alicia Trani's photo, on her own with a mighty guitar, during a gig in May 2003 at The Living Room in New York. And I rediscovered the bruises and beauty in a song like 'When You Find Me' and other .mp3s among Tara Angell's downloads. A song about heartbreak is rawer still recorded five or six years before the album.
Relief my ears hadn't let me down and tipped me off to a singer-songwriter with an over-zealous producer was strengthened by what Tara later disclosed to Venuszine, a review that can be very good on women and musicians:
"Balancing financial responsibilities with her musical goals is slowly wearing on her. Then, of course, there's the unexpected to be dealt with, like the week when her bass player decided to jet off to Italy with his other boss, Patti Smith. The sudden turn of events comes a week-or-so before the 26-year-old Angell's much-anticipated concert debut at the Bowery Ballroom.
'That's the kind of life it is. It's like hectic, crazy, roll with the punches, think fast, you know what I mean?' she sighs, the frustration — or is it exhaustion? — evident in her voice. Her band are pros, though, which she's quick to point out. Everything will be fine she assures herself, but it's these 'details' that she's having the hardest time with. 'There's so much stuff that has to get done, that it's really hard cause I'm not a band. I'm a solo artist'," Tara told Cole Hadden (Venuszine).
Given her fan base and the place she's already won for herself in New York, I don't want to come down too hard on an album that has its qualities and wowed a lot of people, though it left me with mixed feelings.
I don't buy readily into any tale of the American dream too easy to ring true, when I picked on Tara after focussing on a very different musician and while also listening to new work from US singers who've "made it". There's not one with anything but contempt for the American illusion: nowadays "making it" is usually presented as a struggle out of poverty to material wealth and a consumerism that's bankrupting their country. That's a soul-destroying lack of vision for which the rest of the planet foots part of the bill.
Anything right in what's left of the "dream" is what's good in Tara Angell.
The emotional tangles she shares on 'Come Down' -- and she says it's not all about her -- have no more borders than music. There's nothing particularly American about someone who put her money where her mouth is and set her heart on what she wants. She's lucid, like most other musicians, about her real reward. She finds it
"when people come up to me and say they love my album, that it never leaves their CD player — especially when a girl comes up to me and says that and I can see the sincerity in her eyes and she's holding my hand. I could just tear up right there. That's like touching someone's soul. That to me is what life is about. That's the real shit right there, you know what I mean? The fact that I have those moments keep me going. Those are the moments that I'm doing this for."
So it bothers me that she's found life's real rewards come to people who give and share with discernment, but 'Come Down' gives us little chance really to know how Tara does once given an opportunity to be what she says: "I'm a solo artist."
At best, we get this and little more than her acoustic guitar in a love song, 'You Can't Say No to Hell'.
Anybody genuinely creative knows you can't "say no to hell": it's a price most people pay for the real worth they share.
If you've got a real talent along with Angell's commitment, you can start saying no to compromise. I'm not surprised, given what life served up, that Tara was "quick to point out", as Cole Hadden wrote, her fellow musicians are pros. What else could she say?
They got between me and the woman who felt "trapped". No wonder she says she sometimes gets depressed, but depression -- even the real thing -- I know many of us can fight and defeat. Tara, like anyone else, may know this and how music is vital for many people in doing so.
That cocktail party's patently an expression of isolation, a singer alone swimming against the tide like someone fighting to be the woman at the mike in the picture, but if that was the aim, she should have been given much more of her own album.
I've written nothing of the faith Lucinda Williams puts in her rising star. I can't, knowing more of her renown than I've yet heard of her music. In any case, Tara Angell knows she's up front herself now, having taken the first courageous step. The rest partly depends on the quality of the company she keeps.
If the rave reviews 'Come Down' mostly gets, since people seem either to love it or loathe it, have helped buy Tara time to grow more freely, that can only be a good thing. She's told one kind of story and is left with a talent to nurture, not to be rushed.
On this site, apart from their being women, the sole factor uniting every musician featured is self-awareness, however varied their music, clever or simple their lyrics, and "famous" they are.
Each has their singular experience of the equation that makes truth beautiful and enables them to turn beauty into a kind of truth. Now Tara's done an album easy neither on her nor on us, maybe she can turn her back on the graveyard to do what most of us do worst: listen and heed ourselves the messages we give to others.
I've begun to understand how such an ability, along with a yearning for freedom and a gift to make the tales of others their own, is a part of that awareness that makes or breaks a singer-songwriter.
Since Tara says nothing but a coma would stop her living for music, that leaves plenty of time to broaden her range, develop her qualities and open the worst trap-door anyone can impose on themselves.
I've never been to New York and can't tell what Tara can do, just that's she stubborn and resilient. Given encouragement, one truth about getting rid of a trapped feeling is that it doesn't come easy, but unleashing imagination costs nothing and sets musicians, like the rest of us, free.
Tara trusts to honesty, like most women singer-songwriters, just as I trust to music and increasingly the unspoken in trying to understand a little more about people like Tara and enjoy their music despite a few flaws.
Only she'll know when she's ready to go solo, but just past her mid-20s, Tara's of an age to become choosy about the kind of friend who'll stay with you. It's not just her hair that's grown since the picture. In interviews, she hints at what she's learned from the album.
People say they get varied things out of 'Come Down', but what lingers is why Tara was told she can be there for others "like touching someone's soul." To be able to do that means you've reached in and given them hope, the key in anyone's door to a good future.
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