Music Review: Helene Cronin, ‘Maybe New Mexico’
The consummate storyteller’s new album brilliantly weaves together small human moments to reveal big universal truths.
Helene Cronin’s Maybe New Mexico album artwork
Helene Cronin says this record is the record she’s always wanted to make.
Maybe New Mexico, the Texas singer-songwriter’s new album that comes out this Friday, March 7, leads us to rich territory in the stories that her songs tell. One thing you realize within the first few moments is that you’re in the caring hands of an incredibly adept songwriter. The lines are finely wrought, each stress and syllable landing with precision. Her melodies become as familiar as home midway through the first listen. And Cronin makes it look effortless.
Maybe New Mexico moves from one complicated and fine shade of meaning to another. In the song “Powerlines,” Cronin sings of one half of a romantic partnership being more in love than the other. It feels like a secret revealed, but one that may have flitted across our very own thoughts in moments we might not admit.
I’ve chased you cross Texas and back
and I’ve laid my heart in your hands
but you’re a blackbird on a highwire
singing your song
one minute you’re here
next minute you’ve flown
and when you’re out of reach
I’m still hanging on
The chorus contains a callback to the image of a bird on a wire with the line: “that’s how the powerlines are drawn.” It’s pitch-perfect wordplay as well as a refined truth. Cronin’s ability to take her listener to this deep-hearted place, where uncomfortable and subtly whispered honesty resides, is the mark of a courageous and generous writer.
There are moments in this album where you find yourself lulled by the storytelling, and before you know it, you’re invested. It’s in these moments that Cronin turns to the deep and important emotions at the undercurrent of our lives. The title track walks a folksy western edge until the hook “Maybe New Mexico / can help me let you go” guts you as you realize the root cause of the narrator’s wide-ranging roaming.
Really good songwriters have the ability to spool out a tale in a patient and knowing way, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so eventually you find your hands full of pieces that belong to a more involved and important story. Cronin trusts her listeners to assemble these fascinating and essential details, then reveals an unexpected turn that gets at an exact and precise emotion.
Nowhere is this more evident than in her song “Rifleman,” where Cronin rounds her story out with specifics that make you feel as though you’ve known the characters for years. They’re flawed and rich, wounded and quirky, imperfect and messy, and they reflect all of us, reminding us how it feels to love someone and be helpless while they struggle. At the end of the second verse, by the time we feel an affinity for her main character, she delivers these devastating details:
I’d find his whiskey in the hamper
under the dirty clothes
shouldn’t own a 30.06 and hair trigger temper
you can’t control
The way Cronin’s voice falls and turns on the word “whiskey” is a moment beyond compare. There’s a half cry in the note as the story grows bigger in our chests, and we realize where she’s brought us, where she’s been leading us from the start. There’s an influx of so many difficult and important thoughts and feelings that mimic moments in our own lives. It may not be the same story, but we recognize our stories in what she’s saying in her song.
Helene Cronin. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Maker’s Mark” is a track that starts from a muted space, as if overhearing two musicians from behind a door, and then the door is swung open into an expansive introduction. Cronin’s not afraid of intricate and multifaceted emotion, like when she sings: “(I want to) Take what breaks my heart and wrap my arms around it.” It feels true and wise and an incredibly high mark to aspire to. Although Cronin uses first person and speaks about the narrator’s own thoughts, this is a challenge issued to the whole world. The challenge is followed by how it just might be achieved: “When love needs heart and feet, I want to be ’em.”
The production perfectly matches this move from one person’s accumulated minutiae into something important, wide, and as endless as the sky. Throughout the album, there are big moments where everything is soaring, and they are made more so by the smallest moments of intimate sound. Each auditory detail inhabits exactly its own space and moves the story and the song richly forward. The constant is Cronin’s lithe and trusted voice, guiding the story through the syllables and the melody.
Helene Cronin’s songwriting is practiced, polished to a high sheen, and deeply accomplished. To say something beautiful is “finely crafted” seems to weaken the depth of the art. With Maybe New Mexico, she’s masterfully created something important, something heartbreakingly beautiful. She writes with uncompromising skill and an unparalleled depth of humanity. She writes about the things that are us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Doyle Turner. Photo credit: no_aesthetic_stills.
Doyle Turner loves words. Whether it is shaping syllables into songs, poems, early morning journals, handwritten thank yous, lists, or album reviews, he is in a deep and abiding relationship with his college-ruled paper, Uniball Signo 207 .7mm pens, and mostly his keyboard. A good day is spent taking pictures, mailing things, making the words convey the precise meaning, driving, and singing.
