Naked Time, the debut from Texas-bred songstress Diana Darby, is the payment that comes due for buying the lie. Having cut her writing teeth on napkin poems, sitcom scripting and Nashville co-writes, Darby offers up nine original documentary-style narratives scantily dressed in breathy wonder and floaty sonic wash.
There is a quiet strength and peculiar beauty to such vulnerability and revelation. Naked Time, dark and light both weighed and measured, is a string of haunting lullabies that tell nothing less than the truth, no matter the consequence: the perils of tenderness grown hard, love gone awry, abandonment of values and, ultimately, faith in the human spirit to mend what seems irreparably damaged, drained of magic.
A keen interpreter of emotional landscape and tangible experience, Darby crafts small songs with big feel, coming across as a broken-mirror composite of contemporary American womanhood. Songs like the emotional centerpiece, “Ragdoll”, and “Amelia” speak to the alien nature of such truths, pretty vessels of what can be hard to really hear — loss of self, standing apart, and wants that become needs that become must-haves.
These are admissions, reflections and remembrances of what it’s like to be stripped bare and unprotected. Tentative yet illuminating, these songs appeal largely for their insistence on examining the difficult questions by going to places we’ve been, don’t care to return, and yet must, drawn as we are. They glint in morning sunlight, fading in the full-on glare of noon.
Darby’s acoustic guitar and whispery vocals are accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Mark Spencer and drummer Will Rigby, whose contributions add heft and density to already solid composition. Naked Time is a brave if somewhat faltering stance. Perhaps next time Darby will push the envelope further, pull in closer, and dig down into the grounding heretofore only glimpsed. The seeds have been planted.