Shannon Wright - The Jacksonville Primrose

Shannon Wright is one of the most talented singer-songwriters and multi-instrumentalists of the new American folk-rock scene. Her delicate harmonies, built on evocative guitar and piano chords, find in her versatile voice the ideal vehicle of expression. Though clearly influenced by figures such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Suzanne Vega, Shannon Wright's style exists outside of time, far from trends and clichés. A style that can be delicate and vibrant, tender and unsettling all at once. The themes of her songs are urban loneliness, the hallucinations and anxieties of the metropolis. But compared to other contemporary songwriters, such as Alanis Morissette and PJ Harvey, who lean toward a screamed, post-punk electricity, Wright favors a more intimate, deeper style, one that captures some of the most minimalist facets of Lisa Germano's work and at times recalls the sepulchral litanies of Nico.

Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, Shannon Wright began her career as the leader of Crowsdell, an indie band on the same roster (Big Cat) as acts like Dirty Three, Pavement, Blumfeld and Giant Sand. Having left the family property in Jacksonville to move to New York, Shannon had to deal with hard times: the band's career didn't take off, and so, in the midst of an existential crisis, she decided to leave city life behind in favor of a farm in the countryside of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It's there that her rebirth began. "In New York I couldn't write anymore," she recalls. "I constantly felt crushed by the crowds, I felt a sense of claustrophobia. Wide open spaces help me instead, they make me feel more at ease. And on top of that, the music business was making me lose my passion for music."

Compared to Crowsdell's two roots-rock albums (Dreamette from 1995 and Within The Curve Of An Arm from 1997), Wright's solo style is far more restrained and rigorous, as confirmed by her debut album Flight Safety (1999). Built on spare chamber-pop, it's a record of reflection and disillusionment, of hope and despair. Tracks like "Floor Pile" ("I wish I weren't afraid of falling"), with a romantic cello in the background, "All These Things," an aching blues-waltz with organ accompaniment, "Twilight Hall," a mournful hymn to loneliness, or the ethereal closer "Heavy Crown," are desolate, moving soundscapes that recall Neil Young at his most aching. But Wright also proves herself a skilled musician, deftly handling guitar, drums, piano, Wurlitzer, Hammond organ and various keyboards (with a little help from Joey Burns of Calexico on nylon-string guitar and bass). Her compositions are born mostly out of improvisation: "Often," she explains, "I'll pick up the guitar, start strumming, and the lyrics follow right after. Then I transcribe it all into a pile of notes and start rearranging everything with guitar and piano."

The following Maps Of Tacit (2000) continues down this path, venturing into ever darker depths of despair. Wright's music becomes more hallucinatory and spectral ("Dirty Facade," "Fences Of Pales," "Flask Welder"), but the result is on the whole more cryptic and leaves some doubt as to its real effectiveness.

Winning over even the most skeptical listeners, however, is Dyed In The Wool (2001), a decidedly more mature and moving album, in which Wright not only delivers a set of striking songs but also reveals herself to be an excellent pianist. Her voice, raw and visceral, able to shift from Suzanne Vega's tender whispers to demonic howls worthy of Siouxsie, always manages to leave a mark, as on the chilling "Less Than A Moment" or the funereal "The Sable." A sense of tenderness also comes through ("Bells"), as does aching nostalgia ("The Hem Around Us"). But in the end it may be the most unsettling, theatrical side of her repertoire that proves most effective. Just listen to the lied-like "Hinterland," with grim piano tolling in the background, or the instrumental "Colossal Hours," with its thrilling arrangement built on piano and percussion. It's an original blend of Renaissance elegy and horror film, Southern Gothic and expressionist theater, Brecht and Faulkner.

It's thanks above all to Dyed In The Wool (as well as her stints opening for Calexico on tour) that Shannon Wright established herself on the folk-rock scene with her distinctive formula, blending rock, folk and chamber music. A pure talent that shows through in both her lyrics and her music. "What inspires my lyrics," she explains, "are words spoken from deep in the heart. And the same goes for the music. I especially love music that comes from deep in the gut." And it's exactly these "visceral" performances that Shannon gives audiences at her shows, where she takes the stage alone: "I feel very comfortable playing solo, it makes me feel more genuine. And I also like the freedom to reinterpret the songs my own way, improvising on stage." Highly personal performances that Italian audiences got to enjoy during Calexico's last tour, with Shannon Wright as special guest.

Written with Victory At Sea percussionist Christina Files, Over The Sun (2004) opens with a small masterpiece right from the start, "With Closed Eyes": a fairy-tale intro, a vocal half Nico, half voodoo priestess, a pensive minuet intoned by horns, a striking stammering vocal, drum thunder, a vibrant guitar, in continuous collapse toward the depths of despair. Already with "Portray" one can tell how Wright's guitar style is, at times, pure amplification of folk's acoustic arpeggio, a technique that had already been the domain of Slint. "Black Little Stray" is a piece driven by a malleable guitar, now alarmed, now sly, now romantic yet clouded, now dueting with Wright's vocal. It's a vocal line that shifts effortlessly from a pleading Thom Yorke, to low, hushed registers, to the fragile, sensitive tones of a chanteuse, as on "You'll Be The Death," built on a riff-arpeggio that glides by, lean in its merciless rawness, though somewhat weakened by the strings kept in the background. More repetitive are tracks like "If Only We Could" and "Birds," while "Plea" shows off an angular, almost post-dark linearity. On "Throw A Blanket Over the Sun" the guitar is replaced by electric piano, while an increasingly geometric drum pattern becomes its traveling companion, widening in the chorus to underscore the blazing cries of Wright's voice.

Her classical training comes through even more clearly on the following "Avalanche," where the Jacksonville songwriter sits down once again at the piano – this time acoustic – to serve up a gloomy sonata, somewhere between Schumann and Joy Division: it's a madrigal full of hazy unease, heightened by the central cadence that highlights her considerable instrumental skill, and that sets up stark contrasts of light and dark (the contrast between high and low notes, and the dynamic shifts between piano and fortissimo).

Though uneven and naive at times, the album confirms a compositional talent that keeps on improving.

In 2005 Shannon Wright recorded an album together with soundtrack composer Yann Tiersen, titled simply Yann Tiersen & Shannon Wright.

Tiersen is the fine sonic engraver behind films like "Goodbye Lenin" and "Amelie," with a noble lineage going back to composers such as Philip Glass first and foremost, but also Michael Nyman, not to mention his obvious formal debt to Erik Satie: one could hardly have imagined that his melancholic, at times epic piano weavings would blend so harmoniously with the intimate whispers of the delightful Jacksonville primrose. Instead, happily proven wrong, we find ourselves before a bouquet of delicate compositions with autumnal scents, deep and richly colored, yet at times sturdy enough to avoid a listening experience of steadily diminishing returns. Guitars and drums do indeed bolster a sound that, left solely to Tiersen's pianistic breezes and Wright's voice alone, might have risked growing tiresome over time; fear not: that doesn't happen, and the tension stays constant right through to the last track, ensuring attention and emotional engagement throughout. Shannon Wright manages to make her own personality prevail within the project; the balances are precarious, the elements often chase one another, at other times collide, and it's precisely out of this whirling storm of clashing moods and sounds that the album's allure is born.

Wright and Tiersen seem to be out of sync on more than one occasion, as can be heard in "No Mercy For She", where Wright's hushed, pained vocals are swamped by swirls of white noise building in intensity, recalling the best excursions of Mogwai.

"Dragon Fly" is a desert-island song, with the singer-songwriter taking sole command of a doomed, mournful performance that glides over a host of melodic lines counterpointing each other endlessly, ever so lightly. Echoes of the most poetic post-rock, the kind made by Rachel's, can be heard in "Something To Live For", and in "Dried Sea", which starts out calm and whispered before evolving into an emo-mogwai-esque tangle worthy of the best bands on the American indie-rock scene.

If the album proves to belong more to Wright than to Tiersen - relegated to deluxe supporting player rather than co-lead - the balance seems to shift back in "Way To Make You See", where it's the composer who calls the shots, sketching out a melodic line straight out of a 1950s Parisian café, coaxing the singer into a chanteuse performance worthy of Edith Piaf. "Callous Run", on the other hand, is a sharp battle between a furious voice, cutting guitars and the sublime melody staged by Tiersen: a moment where even the din becomes synonymous with a swoon of the senses. In "Pale White" we finally hear a meeting of loving minds, a limbo within the record, where contrast turns into harmony and shared purpose.

A work of great passion and cohesion, resting on balances perpetually teetering on the edge of instability, this Wright-Tiersen collaboration deserves a thousand listens, so as to appreciate the nuances, the ecstasy and the violence, the unplayed notes that seep through the music, and the awareness that inner peace can be found even within the storm of the senses.

And it's precisely from this collaboration that Wright sets off again, delivering Let In The Light (2007). Eleven tracks steeped in the French countryside, reflective and clearly mirroring the mood of the moment, or rather defined by sounds that retain only a distant memory of her original indie-rock roots. So, aside from the feisty "St. Pete" and "Don't Doubt Me", the manic intensity of a Dyed In The Wool fades into soft, piano-driven effusions with a vaguely retro flavour and a more pacified mood.

One could talk about growth, newfound awareness and who knows what else, but falling back on the usual "maturity record" rhetoric doesn't help us grasp the subtlety of Let In The Light, or the clever tightrope act that lets it brush up against the limits of mannerism without ever crossing them.

"In The Morning", "Idle Hands" and "Everybody's Got Their Own Part To Play" reinforce the point, shielding themselves with polite, drawing-room melancholy. All entirely foreseen and foreseeable, to the point you'd want to rip it apart for flowing along without a jolt, without a hitch, or even (just) an attempted change of register. But you can't: Let In The Light wins you over despite an at times mawkish, navel-gazing quality, if only because not everyone is capable of writing a "Louise".

Two years on, it's time for Honeybee Girls, an album celebrating a decade of the American artist's solo career, providing a coherent evolution of the previous work across ten tracks in which her mature songwriting is put to the test in sonic settings now decidedly dominated by acoustic and electronic textures.

The remaining room for tight rhythms and nervy guitar fragmentation is confined almost exclusively to the first part of the record, though even here the rough edges are softened by melody and coexist with graceful acoustic undercurrents.

The album reveals a guiding thread of romanticism, still showing very clear debts to her experience with Yann Tiersen, marking out Shannon Wright's new stylistic territory - no longer defined by pitch-black brushstrokes and abrasive surges, but shaped by equally murky atmospheres rendered through more measured and varied expressive registers, which even include electronic textures.

Particularly in the second half of the record, the break with the past becomes evident, while the piano takes centre stage as the key instrument, pairing with electric guitar or sitting alongside delicate organ notes, until it shines as the lead in the perfectly timed ballad "Strings Of An Epileptic Revival", which brings to mind the PJ Harvey of "White Chalk".

Despite the softer, more refined modes of expression, Shannon Wright never loses the sense of unease that has defined her entire output. That unease is now simply channelled in more measured, and only superficially conventional, ways - but no less effective for it.

If with Let In The Light Shannon Wright had let light filter into her tormented artistic drive, with Honeybee Girls she brought into focus a new dimension, one that draws from her previous experiences the expressive charge needed to fully define her maturity.

Barely a year goes by before it's time for another record, Secret Blood, shaped by a sort of balancing act between her recent romantic turn and a leaning towards electronic experimentation, alongside a return to her first love: fiercely jagged rhythmic and guitar segmentation.

The first thing about the album to grab your attention is in fact the rediscovered expressive urgency that had defined the Jacksonville artist's abrasive style and which seemed to have been gradually smoothed away in favour of a heightened melodic sensibility and that transformation from a singular riot grrrl into a sober lady with her heart turned towards France.

Though clearly harsher than its predecessor, Secret Blood doesn't find Shannon Wright simply brutalizing her guitar or returning to shrieks and jagged vocal turns; on the contrary, her mature bearing as a kind of "grande dame" of American female alt-rock not only softens the melodic lines built on twisting, persistent feedback, but above all tends to slow the pace of several tracks, letting piano harmonies resurface, now gentle, now restless.

Yet it's precisely these latter episodes that betray the absence of that spark which had made Honeybee Girls perhaps the most fluid and emotionally gripping record of the American artist's career: the melodies here seem muffled and not always fully realized, sketches and fragments cut almost on the fly (it's no coincidence that many tracks run very short) rather than "songs" born of careful, painstaking craft.

All this leads one to view the album as little more than a kind of appendix to Honeybee Girls - as always well-crafted, and not without some fine moments, but ultimately closer to a half-step back from the renewed vision sharpened on the previous record than to any further substantial development of it.

Four years after the release of In Film Sound, an album that rode the wave of the abrasive, powerful alt-rock that had defined the previous chapter of her discography, Shannon Wright returned in 2017 with her ninth solo album - one that at times seemed like it might never see the light of day. Motherhood certainly slowed both the process and the inspiration, but the road leading to the creation of Division was also marked by far less happy events and situations, including second thoughts about continuing her career and a general sense of insecurity toward the world. It took the involvement of friends and collaborators to bring this unusually long hiatus to an end and let the record finally come into being. One of the most distinctive and multifaceted entries in her rich songbook, as well as yet another turning point in a stylistic body of work in constant evolution, the album becomes a stark conduit for the restlessness and intensity that never stop informing the artist's powerful inventiveness. Of all her possible turns, this was certainly one of the most surprising.

It's not that Shannon Wright hasn't proven capable of preserving the aching, angry fabric of her art even while giving up overt electric discharges and noise-rock leanings, yet never as much as on Division can one appreciate such an all-consuming pain, a distress born of a vulnerability that offers no escape, indeed turning into an inescapable anguish, a suffering that best distills the inner conflicts the musician has lived through firsthand. Precisely because of this aura of fragility that permeates the whole record constantly (and which is reflected remarkably well in the songwriter's fractured vocal performances), the decision to all but eliminate guitars in favor of piano, organs, keyboards and viola da gamba further sharpens the pronounced emotional qualities of this new batch of compositions, in which the freedom to experiment is higher than ever. Where the six strings do still lend their contribution, the result is anything but predictable: on the title track, strategically placed as the opener, the droning electric guitar commentary, for instance, intensifies enormously the industrial undertone of the arrangement, as well as the artist's pained delivery, almost like a vocal extension of the oppressive hammering that drives the song.

Nor is the tone any sunnier or more relaxed elsewhere: at best the mood softens into a grieving melancholy, a pain left unspoken but always present nonetheless, one it's essentially pointless to try to escape. And when the path crosses into more overtly dark territory, the conviction with which the musician ventures into the tunnels of contemporary gothic music has few equals. The closing "Lighthouse (Drag Us In)" pushes the neoclassical discourse to its furthest extreme, with David Chalmin's viola da gamba delivering the final blow, grafting a vigorous waltz onto a core skeleton that evokes the timeless allure of Chopin's nocturnes, rendered even more vivid by a performance as diaphanous and ghostly as she has ever given - the kind many dark-music heroines still haven't managed to pull off.

If it's true that the black rain has, despite every prayer, kept falling on Shannon Wright's path, her art has nonetheless not suffered for it - if anything, it has drawn deep inspiration from it, resulting in a searing, unsparing record, one still geared toward maximum emotional and sonic economy, free of any redundancy that might weaken its expressive power. And while the artist seems to have moved past the problems that had stalled her creative output, Division remains the clearest, most urgent testimony to a creative impasse overcome by claiming it on musical terms - yielding one of the most important moments of her long career. Whether this will be the springboard for an even bolder exploration of her darker sides is for the future to decide, but that doesn't change the fact that the musician's new aesthetic profile describes, with renewed drive, the traits that have always formed the backbone of her art. That's a fact well worth taking seriously.

A further push toward inner excavation and confessional storytelling, Providence, the Jacksonville artist's eleventh album, massively amplifies the pursuit of an expressive bareness that is both content and container at once, the reflection of an extreme lyrical honesty, framed by spare yet carefully judged musical touches. More classical and unadorned than ever, the artist's poetics still burn with the same intensity.

With the exception of a few fleeting keyboard touches and slight electronic manipulations (sublimating the reversed coda of the closing "Disguises"), the piano is Wright's sole companion, a friend bent to the service of dark, shadowy ballads that trade the livid fragility of early Soap & Skin for the dry dramatism of a Lisa Germano, reinterpreted with a gothic, proudly neoclassical aplomb. The artist's narratives unfold with trembling unease, now slipping into the piano lines, now emerging from them - far more than mere complements to voice and words, they're true leading players, imaginative performers who render every single emotional shift with personality and expressive flair. From the heavy waltzing gait of "Fragments" to the chamber-music pace of "Somedays" (in its own way a scowling reworking of Agnes Obel's cantatas), the two instruments on display wave their mournful partnership back and forth, in a pendulum swinging between a sinister romanticism and a gloomy despair.

Contrite, darkened, yet not resigned, Shannon Wright bravely continues down her solitary path, an apology for pain that seems to constantly find new footholds through which to externalize itself. In its studied essentialism, Providence proves to be yet another meaningful portrait of a perpetually restless art, one for which calm holds absolutely no importance.

Contributions by Michele Saran ("Over The Sun"), Raffaello Russo ("Honeybee Girls" and "Secret Blood"), Vassilios Karagiannis ("Division", "Providence")

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