Artist:     Amy Helm

Album:     What the Flood Leaves Behind

Label:     Renew Records

Release Date:     5.16.2021

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If you ever get a chance to see Amy Helm perform live, you are in for a treat. Her natural talent, eclectic taste, and solid performance come through in every aspect of her recordings as well. How could they not? As the daughter of Levon Helm and Libby Titus, with Donald Fagen as her stepfather, she has been steeped in musical diversity her entire life. Amy’s latest album, What the Flood Leaves Behind, is simply more proof of her innate talent and converging influences. From the plaintive beauty of “Verse 23,” to the soulful verses that follow, Helm and her band spread an honest positivity (“Our voices are lifting up, they are lifting up among the stars”), her voice soaked with the fiber of family friend Bonnie Raitt.

While everyone is a composite of their environment, Helm is a woman and artist who never copies; she is her own person whose music and experiences are distinctly her own. She delivers a personal appeal to those she lost in “Calling Home,” never giving in but looking forward. “Cotton and the Cane” presents a reverent and sincere look at the “poetry of the poor” revealed in her family’s sharecropper background. Her words tell stories we can all recognize.

Then there’s her beautiful voice. Listen to Helm soar on  “Wait for the Rain” or the dazzling harmonies on the closing piano-based “Renegade Heart.”

Amy Helm may reasonably feel a responsibility to carry on a musical tradition but she continues to grow and spread the love in her own sincere, reverent way.

—Gene Knapp