Artist: Jamie Lin Wilson
Album: Jumping Over Rocks
Label: Self-released
Release Date: 10.26.2018
Jamie Lin Wilson has released her second album, the follow-up to 2015’s Holidays and Wedding Rings. At that time she was pregnant with her third child. This one brings a less stressed perspective as Wilson builds character stories of men, women and children coping, dreaming, and celebrating life’s small victories, all with her signature personal touch—she offers fresh perspective on the daily grind. There are ten songs here, five written by Wilson, four co-penned with different writers and a cover of Guy Clark’s “Instant Coffee Blues” sung with Jack Ingram as a duet. The album was recorded live in the studio in Austin and has a distinctly Texas feel.
Her collaborators this time out are a different group with Scott Davis producing, playing bass, guitar and singing. He’s joined by Richard Milsap on drums , Trevor Nealon on keys, Charlie Sexton on guitars and Cody Angel on pedal steel and dobro. Jack Ingram, Evan Felker, and Courtney Patton handle backing vocals. Acclaimed Steve Christensen engineered and mixed.
Wilson’s soaring soprano is purely majestic over a weeping pedal steel, strings, and soft keys in the opener “Faithful and True.” The tempo picks up in the tale of a traveling troubadour being away from family in “The Being Gone.” “Oklahoma Stars” is a co-write with Evan Felker of the Turnpike Troubadours, nodding to the long night that run together and somehow come together to build a relationship or a life. The straight-ahead country “Eyes for You,” features marvelous pedal steel from Angel. It takes the perspective of love for a couple that’s moved well beyond youth –“still I got eyes for you.” “Everybody’s Moving Slow” paints poetic images, as if to capture a hot, lazy day where she wants her lover to remain.
The rather odd title takes its name from an image in the epic mournful song, “Death and Life,” one that took her four years to write. This song, like most on the album, is the embodiment of people watching, studying small details that most would miss. It’s about a widow mourning her husband, still clinging to his memory as the son copes with the death by working with his hands, hammers and nails. Innocent kids hop over rocks in a graveyard.
She follows her duet with Ingram, exploring in her own piano-driven tune “Run” a theme that Guy Clark also wrote about—how long is too long for a woman to stay. “In a Wink” uses seasonal imagery urging us to appreciate the beauty of life’s fleeting moments (“photographs and memories are one inside the other memorizing moments in your mind”) while “If I Told You” returns to the ethereal sound of the opener, as Wilson poses rhetorical, confessional questions with the abrupt concluding line: “If I told you how I really feel about you, would you wish you didn’t know?”
Jamie Lin Wilson’s songwriting has taken, dare I say, a big jump from her debut. She brings a captivating combination of voice, songs, and supporting musicians.
—Jim Hynes
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