'Catalpa', by Jolie Holland

Catalpa Trees

Today, I played the album Catalpa, by Jolie Holland, and remembered just how it is that I've survived five Hobart winters, debilitating heart-lung disease, and a persistent sense of impending doom (brought on by the last two things, as well as by global warming, the Liberal party, politics in general, and most of all, the dark and troubled soul of my recalcitrant Persian cat, Mr Blush...)

Holland is an American musician, singer, and song-writer whose eerie, spell-binding, musical-fables have long acted as my 'chicken soup for the soul'. Some people pray to a deity, some people read self-help books. For emotional and spiritual solace, I listen to Jolie Holland.

Right from the beginning, Catalpa envelopes you in its dreamy warmth. Listening to this album is like slipping into a steaming bubble bath and wallowing for hours, careless of the world and the worry it brings. Harmonicas, banjos, bells, a musical saw, guitars, and the delicate pickings of a ukulele combine to build a subtle soundscape steeped in gloom, yet somehow tinged with spectral light.

Catalpa's folk genre as well as its lyrical images of country roads and lonesome whippoorwills have the potential to create a stagey, hokey, kind of nostalgia common to many such 'Americana' styled albums.

This is not the case here, or in Holland's other three albums. In Catalpa, reference to the past only serves to give glimmering depth to the present. Holland's music creates warm, carefully excavated caverns that you can climb inside: familiar, safe, dark, and dripping with centuries of meaning.

This first album of Holland's is the least polished - you can actually hear her coughing on one of the tracks - but nonetheless remains my decided favourite.

Mr Blush is also quite fond of Catalpa, and I'm sure would love to find the lonesome whippoorwill (pictured below) so that he could eat it...