Dana Falconberry
“Petoskey Stone” (mp3)
from “Though I Didn’t Call It Came”
(Crossbill Records)
Dana Falconberry’s newest release, Though I Didn’t Call It Came, celebrates, explores, and at times laments the vast landscapes in which the songs are set. Touching on themes of childhood curiosity, mortality, and the aching beauty of solitude, the EP’s songs interweave the human experience with the world surrounding it. She guides her listeners down moonlit paths and sandy shores until they are standing right alongside her under the birches, wide-eyed and wondering at the eagles circling overhead.
A Michigan native, Falconberry has thrived musically in Austin, TX, hailed by the Austin Chronicle as one of the city’s “most promising singer-songwriters” and “most arresting female vocalists.” She has captivated audiences with her powerful live shows and haunting recordings, receiving acclaim far beyond the reaches of her hometown. The past few years have found her touring extensively through the US, Europe, and Japan. In 2011, she starred in the critically-lauded music documentary on the Austin music scene, Echotone, which was awarded a New York Times Critics’ Pick.
Recorded in an old church in Austin, TX, Though I Didn’t Call It Came is an energetic leap forward for Dana Falconberry. It is a prelude to a full-length release recorded during the same session, which will be released later in 2012. While her past records have emphasized the sparse and delicate, these songs are lushly orchestrated with a full six-piece band, a string quartet and harpist, rich four part harmonies, and a host of unexpected accents from torn paper to prepared piano.
The thing that you have to keep in mind, while listening to Dana Falconberry sing, is that she is really a real person, really. She is not something that you’re imagining up with a vivid set of notions and ideals. She is not that pretty voice that you’ve always been dreaming about, hoping that you could bring it out from behind those lacy curtains, out from behind the fog and into a real existence. She’s here. Or, she was, and she can be again. Falconberry, of Austin, Texas, can knock you out with one push of a breath and just the introductory notes of a song that will continue to flutter and flit all the way to its high perches. She emits this lonesomeness that seems to stem from an inferiority complex that’s directed at that great big world out there and how puny and ugly most everything tends to feel lined up next to it. She questions what this has all done to her – these considerations of the immensity of the sky and water and the diminutive proportion of one girl of the flesh. She looks toward these mystical, but very touchable and largely measurable things – air and water – and sees in them formidable opponents that we tend to never pick fights with. We just look and curse them from afar, the same as we do with fires and most other people.
Falconberry looks at these aspects of the everyday as allies and foes, knowing that they can’t be stopped or contained, but also getting drunk on the very idea that they cannot be stopped or contained. Some may see it as a burden, but not her. She’s going to enjoy herself – she’s going to enjoy being in well over her head though she will never think of it that way. She uses a soft and cooing voice – one that is halfway between that of a Joanna Newsom and that of a mother hen humming to herself, under her breath, while cooking some homemade deserts in the kitchen on a warm day. She’s going to offer those deserts. She’s going to dish them out and she’ll hand you a fork, ask if you’d like one or two scoops of vanilla ice cream on the side and than watch as you take that first bite in, expecting that you’ll instinctually pull your eyes closed and let out of a satisfied moan.
