ALBUM REVIEW: In Simple Duets of Fiddle and Voice, Phoebe Hunt Captures Complexity
Nancy Posey
Posted On July 24, 2023
Listening to Phoebe Hunt’s newest project, Nothing Else Matters, conjures up a host of adjectives — ethereal, plaintive, haunting, tender. After years performing as a part of The Belleville Outfit and then fronting The Gatherers, Hunt has created an album that is completely stripped down to the essentials: herself and her fiddle.
Phoebe Hunt (photo by Nichola Gell)
The result is a listening experience less like eavesdropping on private conversation than simply witnessing the singer-songwriter’s embodiment of the lines in “Contented”: “I am in love, I am enough, I am contented.”
As Hunt plays, one has the same feeling as watching a ventriloquist perform, realizing one person is responsible for both voices, but sensing there are two. On each song, the fiddle engages in a kind of call and response. The title song sets the pace as Hunt alternates between fiddle solos and almost percussive chops. One would swear the fiddle answers her each time she delivers the hook line. Lyrically, the songs are just as personal and tender as the melodies. In one particularly moving line, when she warns herself, “If I go too far, if I go too fast / I could break my only heart,” the fiddle seems to mimic a heartbeat.
Despite the simplicity of the single voice and fiddle, the tracks offer a musical variety in pace and in lyrics. “The Archer” plays like a last waltz. “Galloping” seems to do just that, the fiddle evoking images of horses, while saying much more about how much control a person actually exerts over life. “Carry On” has fiddle runs that remind listeners that Hunt was a classically trained violinist before being lured away by her love of fiddle and old-time music.
One jewel on the album, “Molly, My Dear!”, could pass as an ancient fiddle tune. In actuality, Hunt co-wrote the song with Robert Alzapiedi, an 80-year-old veteran in a class she taught. Opening with the fiddle fairly buzzing like a bumblebee, this is a song of unrequited love in which the singer admires from a distance but doesn’t dare to say hello.
Whether stating what she will not be in “I Am Not a Traveler” — an outlaw, a widow, a beggar — declaring instead, “I will fight / I’m gonna be happy,” questioning if she’s “Who I’m Meant to Be?”, or laying claim to “the feeling love has given me” in “Earthly Syndication,” Phoebe Hunt invites her listeners into her self-examination.
Phoebe Hunt’s Nothing Else Matters is out July 28 via Thirty Tigers.
