On the album mother’s day, Canadian singer-songwriter Suzanne Jarvie transforms deep-seated grief into a landscape where folk and Americana intertwine with a haunting, dreamy allure — from solemn piano-set mystique to touches of strings. Jarvie weaves private loss and motherhood experience into a broader meditation on mortality. The record functions as a journey of total surrender, bridging the grounded innocence of piano melodies with literary richness and apt symbolic figures.
Our recent interview with Suzanne, here, digs even deeper into this excellent album — as she elaborates on aspects like the release’s navigation of sorrow and its use of heroic archetypes.
Amongst the album’s many highlights, “caterpillar” envelops with its layered vocal emotion and piano-led melodics, its “coming home” vocal stirrings building into warming rhythms and acoustic strums. Its lyrical depictions artfully trace the despair as one witnesses a loved one self-destruct, “like a gambler at a table.” Both the human experience and the role of motherhood are tactfully explored here and throughout. “Caterpillar is a lullaby lament I wrote for my boy, how I tried to save him… because I made him inside me, but he’s not mine to save. He has to save himself,” Jarvie explains.
In the more ominous spectrum, “Polonium” is described by Jarvie as “a song about murder — something horrific, an atrocity.” Prancing piano trickles with moody prowess, delectably eerie as the vocals navigate with a crime scene-like description into more illuminated layers. “Polonium. That′s how they killed me. Two-toned polonium. Death kissed and filled me,” Jarvie’s vocals move into a ghostly presence, its “not real” decisiveness sending chills as flashes of strings emerge.
Another standout is the album’s title track, conveying “rage and despair” per Jarvie, as nature-laden imagery and folk-rock sophistication emanate. Elsewhere, “lifeline” succeeds in the no-frills acoustic folk realm, ruminating on time past and remaining, while closer “temporary emissary” brings listeners back to the piano-touched lushness, again channeling motherhood in playing as a life review and tribute to Jarvie’s daughter Claire. Full of sincerity, lived experience, and riveting songwriting, mother’s day is an excellent album from Suzanne Jarvie.
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“caterpillar” and other tracks featured this month can be streamed on the updating Obscure Sound’s ‘Emerging Singles’ Spotify playlist.
