The rising Nashville star’s debut album ‘My Silly Life’ is likely one of the most convincing nation statements shortly
Like most singers new on the town, Brittney Spencer spent the majority of her first decade in Nashville paying dues. She busked to passersby, sang backup for Carrie Underwood, and carved out an area for provocative songwriting within the metropolis’s Christian-worship-music group. Then, in 2020, within the wake of nation music’s reckoning with its lengthy historical past of racial exclusion, Spencer uploaded a viral acoustic cowl of the Highwomen’s “Crowded Desk.” Since then, she’s opened for Willie Nelson and Megan Thee Stallion, sang on the CMAs, and even turned an affiliate member of the Highwomen, the group whose track began all of it.
However till My Silly Life, a debut nation file that’s sure to cement Spencer’s place within the style, all of that seeming stardom had gone untested. The album takes a number of songs to search out its footing, however as soon as it does, My Silly Life lifts off and soars: It’s onerous to consider a stronger run on a rustic LP in latest reminiscence than the five-song stretch starting with the self-reclamation ballad “The Final Time” and ending with the tender heartbreak of “If You Say So.” “The microwave love and toaster vows,” she sings of the faltering new marriage within the latter, “can’t naked the burden of us proper now.”
Spencer traverses a mix of muscular pop rock, textured soul, and anthemic singalong pop, all of it grounded squarely in a genre-agnostic nation that conjures Maren Morris’ landmark album Hero. (Morris, one in all Spencer’s foremost champions, looms massive right here, including vocals on one track, getting name-dropped in one other.) Spencer has assembled an ace staff to showcase her versatile voice and incisive writing, together with producer Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour). The result’s a file unencumbered by the necessity to continually show its Nashville bona fides, and in doing so finally ends up being one of many extra convincing nation statements in a while.
My Silly Life is a deftly informed assortment of tales that, like her “Crowded Desk” cowl, simmer with subtext. Beneath the sugary gloss on these songs about flirting and flailing lurk layers of that means: Beneath the ode to partying at house in sweatpants on “Night time In” lies the specter of “drunk boys mumbling ‘Can I purchase you a drink?’” The love story of “My First Rodeo” additionally works as a parable of a singer who’s spent years being ignored in a city that fingers out alternatives like coupons. Then there’s the acoustic nearer, “Reaching Out,” a track about striving for honesty when issues aren’t going nice. “This world is stuffed with tales that look fairly like my very own,” Spencer sings in a whisper. It took too lengthy, however thank God she’s lastly been given the possibility to inform them.
