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If her debut announced her as a distinctive new Americana voice, Deep Feeler, with its conflicted raw emotions, simple but effective melodies and imagery, reinforces Liv Greene as being one of the brightest stars in the genre’s constellation.
Now based in East Nashville, Deep Feeler is Liv Greene’s second album, the follow-up to the well-received Every Bright Penny. It’s an album about self-acceptance and a reframing of how she approaches her music and how she wants to be seen.
Co-produced with Grammy-winning engineer Matt Andrews and anchored by her guitar and serene vocals with upright bassist Hazel Royer and drummer Dominic Billet as the rhythm section and contributions from Jack Schneider on electric guitar, Sarah Jarosz on mandolin and Elise Leavy on accordion and piano, it opens with the slow strummed title track, Mike Robinson’s pedal steel-keening away, in the first line, she declares “I’m aware I’m a liar/always lying to myself about my expectations”. It reads like a wistful love song as she sings, “I had you there, I had my aim true/moonlit kissin’ in the yard, talkin’ late it wasn’t hard/but you got scared and I don’t blame you /hell it’s brave enough to make the call, you know it isn’t your fault”, but come the refrain, “I’m a deep feeler, but I ain’t no healer/honey I can’t change you and I should’ve never tried”, it feels much more like she’s singing to herself.
Another slow walker, Made It Mine Too, reflects on a propensity for mirroring to unadvisedly maintain a relationship (“though I don’t like the person I became in your keep/I was so full of you, with no room for who I wanted to be”) but getting sucked into the toxicity (“just to get through your black and your blue/I made it mine too/see I thought your hurt would stay your hurt/and I’d take it off when I wanted to/but I’ve found that ain’t true/cause you made it mine too”).
One of the folksier numbers with its wide-open feel and chiming pedal steel (and perhaps vague hints of Jackson Browne), Wild Geese is based around travelling from town to town, playing shows “til your voice was shot and your ears were tired of hearing the same hurt up and wired/singing lullabies that are just love songs for the one that did you wrong” and again reflecting on letting a stubborn heart take the bruises rather than endure the loss (“you know you’re always crying/like you know she’ll keep on lying if you let her/like you let yourself drink poison again”). The point of the title being that when the geese do fly away, they come back strong.
The outcrop of going through a breakup, the gorgeous, simply fingerpicked and strummed Flowers (where Nanci Griffith comparisons are not wide of the mark) is using a recurring image, a move looking to self-reliance and loving oneself (“I’m a 21st century woman who’s crying like a little child/wearing my poor heart on my shopping cart in the frozen food aisle/and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, spending my hard earned money for/when the truth is I just can’t afford to miss you any more”), her epiphany at being able to make it without the crutch of an unreliable lover succinctly encapsulated in the single letting go line “I am buying myself flowers these days”.
Though not her first queer relationship as a teenager, Katie is about the first time she allowed herself to not feel it was something wrong and to relax into the romance (“when the light gets gold/when I’m feelin bold/and when I turn navy blue/my mind turns to you”), though even here “I’ll just say I’m glad you’re around/for whatever time you’ve found for me” still carries that self-worth niggle. With just Christian Sedelmyer’s subtle fiddle as accompaniment, it’s a standout.
Her awakening to the need to change herself is repped in the more musically robust, mandolin-flecked backwoods country chug of I’ve Got My Work To Do (“I wanna see what I can do about this crazy world before we cast it underwater/I wanna be a reckless woman, a damn hard working girl before I’m anybody’s wife or a perfect daughter/I’ve got a dream that’s too damn big…but just cause it don’t come easy now, don’t mean it won’t come true… I’ve got my work to do”), a rebirth captured in the lines “I wanna get dirt on my hands and be proud to fuck it up before I get it right/I don’t want to hesitate or apologize/I’ve done that so much of my life”.
And if defiantly moving on is part of the catalyst for change, so too, as in the harmonised mantra You Were Never Mine, is not holding on to things you couldn’t and shouldn’t (“as if you were here right now/I’d probably run into your arms/never mind the knowing of the way they’d do me harm and the worst part of all is I know you’d hold me tight/let me believe that I’d be yours/ just like old times”).
That letting go and moving but understanding it’s never easy (“when every dream still has your name, every picture has your frame/every fire’s got your flame… it may take me a long while before every time I think of you I don’t melt the way that I still do”) also informs the self-explanatory It Ain’t Dead Yet (“but I think it’s on the way out”) with its steady percussive guitar rhythm Greene’s voice, as it does on several songs, soaring in the chorus.
That’s followed by the penultimate companion piece, the bluesy loping Halfway Out returning to the choice to be resolved (“I make an effort making an effort/every night and day it’s a choice I make, cause I don’t have to doubt it what we have found/don’t have to think about whether I want you around til I look to the flowers long dead on the window”) and not clinging to things that are already falling apart (“I think you said it all when you said that you weren’t sure/what’s the use in trying now/when you are halfway out”).
You may be reminded of the Serenity prayer “to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”. The album’s closer, just her voice and guitar with its distant echoes of Janis Ian and Shawn Colvin, I Can Be Grateful is arguably also its peak of perfection, a song that acknowledges that you can feel opposing emotions in finding acceptance simultaneously as she sings “I can be grateful, and still mad/I can be happy and still sad/ I can be learning to deal with the fact that I can’t be yours anymore”. If her debut announced her as a distinctive new Americana voice, this, with its conflicted raw emotions, simple but effective melodies and imagery, reaching for acceptance and striving to see yourself through your own eyes rather than others, reinforces her as one of the brightest stars in the genre’s constellation. “I can be grateful”, she says. This album is testament you should be too.
Deep Feeler (18th October 2024) Free Dirt Records
Order: https://lnk.to/liv-greene-deep-feeler
