Last month we introduced Mirror, Reflect, the forthcoming album by Bloomington, Indiana-based songwriter Amy O on Winspear. “The record charts the experience of new motherhood during the pandemic,” we wrote, “where twin forces of uncertainty and isolation ran a deep seam of precariousness through everything.” But as single ‘Dribble Dribble’ highlighted, Amy O explores such themes with a compassionate and playful tone. “The lo-fi pop sound lift[s] rhyming schemes from the books she read to her daughter,” as we continued, “to offer a mood at once fun and incisive, and Glenn Myers’s backing vocals further the conversational closeness.”
New single ‘Early Days’ continues these sensibilities, broaching the difficult experience of becoming a parent with a distinctly relaxed mood. Fingerpicked guitar and gentle vocals knit into a comforting blanket which Amy O uses to reassure both her past and present self, viewing the naivety of young motherhood as both a blessing and a curse. It ultimately finds both joy and grief in time’s habit to slowly slip on past us. Snapshots from the time are presented side by side, the song a scrapbook cataloguing the years. Days of being milked like a cow, post-partum OCD, batches of lemonade, a bear digging through the trash. As the song concludes: “I’m piecing it together again / Nothing is lasting.”
