ALBUM REVIEW: Morgan Wade Puts Full Vocal Power Behind ‘Obsessed’
Henry Carrigan
Posted On August 15, 2024
As she did on her 2021 debut album, Reckless (ND review), and on last year’s Psychopath (ND review), Morgan Wade showcases a vocal power that combines the clarity and aching vulnerability of Patty Loveless and the vibrant, soaring phrasing of Stevie Nicks on her third album, Obsessed.
Shimmering guitars lay down a reverberating wall of sound on the propulsive opening track, “Total Control,” as Wade’s raw vocals lift the song into the sonic stratosphere, setting the stage for the remainder of the album. Musically, it’s as if Wade and her band transformed momentarily into Fleetwood Mac playing “Dreams.”
The spacious ballad “Department Store” rides along a bed of pedal steel as the singer reflects on the necessity of giving up family and home to create one’s own identity and the ambivalence about freedom that such an act brings. Cascading piano chords float underneath the title track, a tender ballad about the ways we fall into relationships, letting others possess us; no matter their shortcomings, we refuse to give them up.
In its lyrics and in its waves of aching pedal steel, the haunting “2AM in London” evokes the loneliness the singer feels far away from home. The pair of lovers in Wade’s cantering story song “Hansel and Gretel” lose each other in a forest of emotions and never make it back, while the spare, echoing “Spin Me” stares into the abyss of a relationship broken beyond repair even as the singer holds out a thread of hope for restoration.
Pop star Kesha joins forces with Wade on the elegiac ballad “Walked on Water,” another mournful tale of regret and lost love. The Nicks-like “Moth to a Flame” mimics the heat and desire that draws us into the promise and dangers of passion.
The album closes with “Deconstruction,” a cinematically unfolding musical tale that climbs to a crescendo of emotion in Wade’s transcendent vocals, conveying the ragged beginnings and endings of relationships and the hope of starting over.
On Obsessed, Wade crafts songs of heartache and hope, despair and loss, and vulnerability and resistance, delivering them wrapped in her exceptional vocals. She’s without a doubt one of the finest singers in country and Americana music today, and this album is her best yet.
Morgan Wade’s Obsessed is out Aug. 16 on Sony Music Nashville.
