Maria Taylor is no rookie to the music game.
For more than ten years, she has been making her name throughout concert halls and records stores alike, as both a solo artist and a member of the duo Azure Ray, as well as being featured alongside Bright Eyes, Moby, and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, to name a few.
With her latest solo album, Something About Knowing, Taylor’s music carries plenty with it – an upbeat, yet dramatic feeling of calm hopefulness and eased tension, supported greatly by the evident transition Taylor has recently made into motherhood (heard clearly on the album’s title track).
On trademark folk-pop tracks like “Up All Night” and “You’ve Got A Way With the Light,” Taylor displays her tranquil voice with support from plucked guitars and simple tap-along drumming.
The slow, moody “Broken Objects” brings in male vocal support to compliment Taylor’s ethereal chants, while “This Is It” adds a level of atmospheric swirls into the mix, taking the echoes and samplings that premiere earlier on “Tunnel Vision” one step further.
The album’s closer, “A Lullaby for You,” is a heartfelt example of a combination of maturity and youthful innocence. The ambient, borderline eerie echoes and shifts throughout the background are quick and sudden, snapping in and out of minimal acoustic guitar scales. The song is a massive effort, openly addressing Taylor’s newborn(-ish) muse.
Something About Knowing bursts at the seams with love and adoration. Each word comes through with a sense of sincerity and naturalness, giving a feeling that her new inspirations brought her to a new level of songwriting and capability, and that this was the album Taylor set out to create.
Release Date: October 29th, 2013
Rating: 3.25/5
Runtime: 35:49
Tracklist:
1. Folk Song Melody
2. Up All Night
3. Tunnel Vision
4. Sum of Our Lives
5. You’ve Got a Way with the Light
6. Something About Knowing
7. This Is It
8. Broken Objects
9. Saturday in June
10. A Lullaby for You
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Written By: Eric Riley
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