Linda Marks offers her best CD yet with The Piano. While Marks’s previous discs were pleasantly breezy, unwieldy in a good way, her song craft sharpens here, becomes more structured with a plentitude of snappy instrumental parts, lilting vocals, and a considerate layering of voice, piano, and many other instruments. Additionally, Marks offers all originals this time around.
Title track “The Piano” is a beautifully delivered song, Marks, recalling emotional events and key people in her life, associates them all with a family piano.. Her high vocal reaches lofty places, with lovely sustains, and a traveling vocal that finds a warm home amidst her ivories and a moody violin. This one carries the listener along for a joy ride through the singer-songwriter’s childhood fascination with music, giving us a clear image of how this song and her entire life’s work actually began.
“Between Night And Day” is a bright, toe-tapping affair. Between Marks’s waves of piano notes and Dave Birkin’s shiny and mellifluous saxophone is that voice. Marks’s vocal carries well over the tuft of instrumentation that wafts in warm perfect motions throughout this song.
A tender melody moves its way pleasantly through “Angel,” a Marks flight of fancy with her amazing coos capturing the nature of the title. Rising up with her voice is a pedal steel, a s line that seems to be singing its notes with a upon these perfect weaves.
“The Child” is an especially affective piece. Marks’s lilting vocal melody moves over tasty and brittle banjo notes as well as a rustling harmonica, both played by Andy Daigle. Marks’s voice contrasts well with these rustic flavored acoustic instruments and it shows what she can accomplish sans piano. Her soul baring emotional honesty is staggering while describing life events with keen detail that forms a clear picture in the listener’s mind.
“Forever Home Lullaby” has the warmth of a lullaby sung by a very talented singer who understands how to shift her voice to achieve maximum emotive impact. Marks’s voice wraps around her tender piano melody like a blanket as a pretty pedal steel weeps beautifully in the backdrop.
Marks‘s piano strikes and Jackie Damsky‘s weepy violin bring “The Gardiner” to three dimensional emotive life. Marks delivers a somber piano melody that expresses a wellspring depth of feeling for an old friend who is no longer here. Marks’s voice, with her control of her timbre, reflects warmth, loss, and respect in each measure, and, with that violin line beside her, she creates a vivid portrait of the lady this song pays homage to.
Ushering us into “Heroes” with her stunningly lovely coos, Marks respects these timeless cultural icons. She takes us into her vision of heroism and how heroes can eventually become targets for the meandering nobodies in this world. Cleary written in the aftermath of the David Ortiz incident, Marks ponders the imponderable: why would anybody gun down such a remarkable man? Her delivery makes us feel the mindless frustration while offering us hope that the world is still a place of positive possibilities. Her voice inspires with its constant lifts, shifting dynamics and tempos to create a feeling of courage and triumph.
“Annie” showcases Marks’s high pretty voice at its highest. She’s angelic in form, passing over a bright solid piano melody. That melody, buttressed by a bobbing violin line, carries one forward with delightful ripples of notes. Meanwhile, Marks simply stuns by keeping her voice so steadily high, contrasting brightly with the rivulets of notes beneath her.
A bright, breezy flugelhorn line from Bo Winiker shadows Marks’s moody, low key piano on “The Coming Of Winter.” Marks sings this one with a slight tilt toward melancholy, the coming of winter signifying the end of something, a time of cold weather when people are isolated, staying indoors more often than not. The singer-songwriter takes us into this darker journey with a lilting vocal line that keeps the song in a perfect motion, creating that feeling that the song is taking us somewhere.
Closing track “The Dreamer” finds Marks playing a jaunty piano line as Andy Daigle injects a flinty banjo beside it. Marks slides her mellow vocal line over the snappy instrumentation. That instills the song with a mischievous sense of fun, perfectly capturing the good natured adolescent freedom that this tune needs to express. With a spanking hard piano chord, Marks shifts gears to look at life from an older person’s perspective.
Marks has outdone herself on The Piano. She has never marshaled her musical strengths as well as she does on this album. She has everything perfectly arranged, comfortably layered, and smoothly performed. Aside from her solid song craft, Marks still delivers the personal warmth in her lyrics and delivery that she has always been known for. She just delivers it better than ever on this disc. Featuring players Bo Winkler, Craig Akin, producer Doug Hammer, Joe Sabourin, Mark Bishop, Valerie Thompson, and Woody Carpinella, with Hammer turning the knobs at his Dreamworld Productions studio, this disc presses all of these talents together to arrive at a beautiful structure.
