‘Other Girls’ Embodies Lillie Mae’s Ear for Emotion and Experimentation

“You’ve Got Other Girls for That,” the haunting opening track of Lillie Mae’s ethereal new album, Other Girls, occupies the soundscape between jangly folk-rock and the echoing minor chord of progressive rock. Lillie Mae’s plaintive vocals wrap themselves around the tautly plucked mandolin and guitar, and fiddles wash in on bridge to deliver us onto the shores of a new world where the singer declares her freedom from the past. “I ain’t your baby, even though I thought I’d be / I ain’t your only, maybe the only one who thinks that’s so / I ain’t your first choice, maybe once upon a time / When I was living with delusions in mind.”

The album’s opening revels the breadth and the depth of Lillie Mae’s musical inventiveness. “Crisp and Cold” opens with a sparsely furnished musical landscape, with layered vocals providing the chilling beauty on the opening verses before blossoming into a kind of inverted ’60s pop song with galloping guitar. “Blue Heart” is a gentle country swinger that manages to weave in a Beatles-esque sound among the lines of lilting mandolins and swelling fiddles. Lillie Mae takes a page from Kacey Musgraves’ punky, cosmic hillbilly on the deceptively bright “At Least Three in This Room,” which opens with the piquant line: “How many lanes are either/or?” The song’s a perfect riposte to the lover who casts aside partners like leaves fall from trees but who never looks over his shoulder to see who’s watching him and planting the seeds of his undoing. “Didn’t I” weaves in phrases from the Marshall Tucker Band’s rambling songs, even as it captures the ambivalence woven insidiously into all relationships. The album closes with hurricane-force winds on “Love Dilly Love,” a psychedelic folk chamber piece that opens sparely with vocal and mandolin before moving quickly into an echoing psychic cyclone of words and sound.

Other Girls, produced by Dave Cobb in RCA Studio A, showcases Lillie Mae’s ingenious songwriting, her soaring vocals, and her creative ability to weave many musical styles into a single song. Every song powerfully evokes raw emotions even as it wraps such power in the carefully crafted beauty of the song’s lyrics and music.