Simplicity can be many things. It can be elegant. It can be minimalist. It can be stupid. It can be sacred. It can be deceptive.
Tekla Waterfield’s simplicity is hopeful. When I look around and see an absence of hope in many people, I need an album like her latest release with Jeff Fielder, Mother Mind.
Ms. Waterfield tells me that this album came out of a period of depression, postpartum and mid-COVID. Yet this is not even remotely a depressing album. Seven of the eleven tracks are up-tempo (including one piece for solo voice); none of them is particularly slow. The lyrics are filled with praise and resolutions to action, treating the difficulties of having to make personal decisions in this world where everyone seems to want something from you. When the songs refer to sadness at all, they remain ironically detached, even in the song called “Sad”:
I’ll take my pill; I’ll eat it well
Does it help? I cannot tell
Maybe today’s just not my day
Maybe tomorrow I’ll be in a better place
One of the truly lovely touches to the album as a whole is Ms. Waterfield’s commitment to alternating points of view. I suppose one of the lessons of having a child is that they remind you that you too are someone’s child. Sometimes this is painful — I have a few dozen such pains. Most of the times it’s humbling. It invites one to look at one’s own world honestly, with the eyes of someone else, someone you supposedly knew since you grew up with them — only to realize the world looks far different to them from what you imagined.
The converse, however, is also true. One can just as easily imagine how they look at you and how very different you look to them. Our parents look at us the way we look at our children. Surely they must feel just as puzzled, enamored, dissatisfied, grateful. A little humility reminds each of us that it’s no less difficult for them to grow up and watch others grow up than it is for us.
The way Ms. Waterfield assumes these points of view — even using the children’s voices in the closing track — shows her gift for framing delicate emotion without indulging in it for sheer effect.
Things have changed but I’m still the same
A different hat, a different name
and I wonder if I’ll ever be ever truly satisfied
I’ll always be reaching
higher
than I can ever see
Don’t give up
Don’t give up on me
No matter how desperate the situations in the songs become, persistence remains. Hope remains. Not the Pollyanna/Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm kind of hope that Poof! Everything will happen magically!, but the Vaclav Havel kind of hope:
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
This is an album about making sense of it all, and having that conviction of hope: that it will, finally, make sense as one continues alternately to plod, stumble, glide, then dance along.
The a cappella opener “I Am Alive” sets the hopeful mood nicely. I’m a big fan of Ms. Waterfield’s voice. It’s strong and sincere, a far cry from the glib and overprocessed sound so popular in these days of whispertune. The second track, “Something My Own” immediately picks up the theme of a new life and establishes the second theme of working hard for hope. The album is filled with rhetorical questions from here on. It is a thoughtful way to tie the disparate songs together as an album, all the way to the lovely closing track “Will You Remember Me?” Each song draws different connections, lyrically and musically, to the world. One can hear all the streams from Atlantic R&B, outlaw country, British folk revival, even Elliott Smith, blending into a pure 21st Century kind of sound that Ms. Waterfield and Mr. Fielder make their own. I particularly love their interplay on “Lately.”
The stripped down, gradually building “Will You Remember Me” is a perfect bookend. As “I Am Alive” announces a new life to explore, “Will You Remember Me” commemorates the end of an old life. It seems so simple to arrange the tracks in just such an order, but it isn’t. In these days of algorithmic palaver, albums have become rare; intelligent, conscientious albums as albums instead of just a bunch of songs, even rarer.
Thank goodness, then, that there are still gifted artists trying to keep it up-beat.
