Oakland-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lizzy Dutton is the latest artist to release with Ghost Mountain Records, the homes of acts such as Sophia Corinne and Emma Geiger. Her sound owes debts to classical violin training she received during her early years in New York State as well as the country and Americana styles which populated later periods spent in Austin and Nashville. New EP Amnesia sees Dutton utilise a combination of violin, guitar, pedal steel and piano to weave soundscapes both intensely personal and more generally familiar. Spaces conjured from the interplay of love and loss, each haunting the other, destined to always coexist.
Take opener ‘Lullaby’, a succinct track as tender as its title suggests, though within the warm nighttime comfort exists something less certain. A doubt implicit in the very need to reassure. “It’s okay to say / how you feel,” Dutton sings, “know the mystery inside / is just as real // it’s okay to say / goodbye.” The title track offers a more upbeat energy but retains this balance of conviction and doubt. The forgetfulness of the title pervasive but not complete, a sense of longing persisting through the gloom which acts as an energising force.
I forget where I am from
cus everything looks the same
I forget the branch and stone
I forget everythingamnesia
amnesia
I still know I’ve got to see ya
I still know
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Uncertainty is again a key feature on the moody ‘Living Archetype’, while the dawning warmth of ‘When Summer Ends’ finds hope it the promise of change, no matter how far off such a transformation might be. “When summer ends / I’ll be a new woman,” Dutton sings, “when summer ends / I want to be with my woman.” ‘New Mexico’ follows as a kind of practical realisation of these dreams, with weeks of quarantine and months of trying to feel again, before closer ‘Human’ attempts to place such struggles within a wider experience of life. An acknowledgement of loss as a ubiquitous thing, not as some descent into pessimistic dread but a manner of coping. If pain is common to us all, then what’s the use in holding on to guilt and shame?
am I human
if I can’t bend
is it human
to avoid our end
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Amnesia is out now via Ghost Mountain Records and you can get it from the Lizzy Dutton Bandcamp page.
