Allison
Shapira – Coming Home (Independent)
Describing herself as a recovering opera singer, in
2012 Allison Shapira decamped from Harvard, and what reads like a particularly
highflying career in communications and the diplomatic corps, to play the
European coffee house circuit, with nothing but her new songs and an acoustic
guitar for company. Remarkably, she’d only begun playing and writing lyrics the
previous year.
She seems to have taken to the instrument quite
naturally, eliciting a warm, unfussy tone from the strings, and what she lacks
in technical know-how, she more than compensates with a voice that’s
simultaneously rich, honeyed, dense and altogether quite beautiful. Set
alongside her delicately picked guitar, it’s the groundbreaking early works of
Joan Baez that come most readily to mind, though Shapira concentrates far more
on her own material, rather than the traditional oeuvre. Interestingly, the one
cover on “Coming Home” is Baez’s mid-‘70s calling card “Diamonds and Rust”.
The album begins with an absolute gem; “Man Walks By” is a love song of sorts, but with all
the ambiguity and maturity of a classic Carole King or Carly Simon number. “All Along” recounts the tale of that initial trip to
Europe, though not the adventure, but rather the heartbreak of leaving someone
special behind. Known by her growing fan base as ‘Allison from Boston’, perhaps
it’s her “Song for Boston” that best defines
her. It’s another love song, but this time it’s for a city, and much like the
rest of the record, it’s heartfelt and sincere.
Tony S.
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