Artist:     Andrea Baker

Album:     Wild in the Hollow

Label:     Red House River Music

Release Date:     10.4.2019

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You could call Andrea Baker a country singer, a folkie or sometimes a coffeehouse crooner, depending on which song you’re playing, but that’s really not what matters. She’s also a writer, singer and (fundamentally) a storyteller, which also means a dash of actress thrown in. The songs of Wild in the Hollow feel seasoned, lived-in and always comfortably familiar as a result. Still, the sound isn’t as important as the experiences it’s meant to convey. Perhaps the most defining line comes early with the plain-spoken chorus, “Tell me your story / I’ll tell you mine.”

The songs here are all based around those small slices of real life: snapshots of small-town loneliness, autumnal reminders of someone missed, simple moments of personal pain and the like. Though these pictures can often be sad or unpleasant, Baker means it all to be therapeutic. The opening title track spells out the theme that “brokenness and beauty meet,” walking a pleasant line between folky humility and sweeping drama. There’s a similarly wide-ranging mix of tones throughout. The production keeps Baker’s piano and husky been-around-the-block voice at the center, garnished with strings, horns, mandolin, pedal steel or whatever else fits at a given moment.

There’s a little twang here and there, though (usually) not enough to put off listeners who don’t care for country. “Shawneetown” offers a comforting piece of late-night pop tinged with classic R&B, while the semi-bombastic “Dark Moon Lullabye” would make a good addition to some kind of gothic film soundtrack. Elsewhere she touches on jaunty Vaudeville swing in the almost-too-cute “Cock-a-Doodle Ditty” or warm gospel with “Magdalena.” Each piece here goes somewhere different, but in a way they’re all the same: people being healed by sharing their troubles and flaws. Somehow that’s a story that never gets old.

—Geno Thackara