Randi Driscoll- Glass Slipper

Randi Driscoll- Glass Slipper

A feature article by Nat Bourgon

It is telling that “Glass Slipper” opens with “The Rest”, a song with genes as candid and gutsy as found on “Let Me Be Your Angel”, the impassioned lead off track from Randi Driscoll’s 2000 breakthrough album “The Play.”

Indeed, Driscoll's new album "Glass Slipper" stews with the raw, confrontational sizzle that roasted "The Play” to crisp appeal.  Both records inspect the way in which love writes the shape of our souls, through tests, traffic jams of faith, and transformation.  If “The Play” is an angst infused, fiery diary of a romantic relationship’s circuit from delight to dissolution, chronicling the twinkle and glitter of early promise, to the ache and injustice of endnotes, then “Glass Slipper” is a matured, mindful sequel, sixteen years on.  A preliminary listen may reveal steady gushing from a coupled up woman, thriving in the expanse of love’s inner circle.  However, behind the swaggering gleam of a happy heart, lies a meditation on the merits of self-love. “Glass Slipper” spells out the benefits of being your own angel to yourself first and foremost, instead of determining self-worth and value from being another’s angel or easily shunned excess. “Glass Slipper” advises that it is through loving yourself fully and nurturing your own physical and mental capacities with care and respect that allows you to achieve the well-suited, harmonious love that Driscoll spends much of the record praising. 

With “Glass Slipper”, Driscoll realizes that you can become privy to a more profound pocket of love when you become a thoughtful, committed lover to your own being.  Instead of placing its bets on turning to companionship for a heroic saviour, “Glass Slipper” reframes the argument so that being loved becomes a bonus by-product of loving yourself resolutely. “Glass Slipper” claims that having a supportive, loving partner is a reflection of the work you have done on yourself. The idea is that the best relationships are launched by the renaissance of fulfillment weaved into your radiating, inviting body language, found from accumulating the pride and courage necessary to be thoroughly true to who you are. “Glass Slipper” places the onus for a vibrant lifestyle and inner conciliation on your own self, and situates a prized partner as a representation of your inner elation, instead of the reason for it.

Both “The Play” and “Glass Slipper” are concerned with love’s implications, the type lurking on a deep down, gut level. Driscoll’s songwriting has always been at its tallest when she becomes an outlet and point of release for our most innate, private thoughts. Driscoll’s music makes it feel acceptable for us to have unsorted racket inside our brains. She takes the art of instinctual communication a step further throughout the new album by divulging otherwise reclusive, buried layers through the movement and enunciation of her voice.  As recently articulated by her longtime producer Larry Mitchell, Driscoll’s words may provide a concise summary, but it is her voice itself that does the elaborating. Despite her pictorial instrumentation and metrical lyrics, Driscoll’s voice always manages to do the heavy lifting, and thus becomes the focal point of the ears.

After flexing her pop muscles a little more markedly on 2006’s “LUCKY” by raising the melodic agreeability of her songs and upping the tempos, and then furthering the craft of piano balladry to enchanting effect on 2009’s sparser “365 Days”, “Glass Slipper” reacquaints us with Randi Driscoll’s activist-like spunk that precipitated heavily over “The Play.” “Glass Slipper” contains the most kaleidoscopic, sonorous songs of her career to date, dressed in the most decorative apparel of sound she has sported yet. The songs on “Glass Slipper” feel juiced up on life. They are lit up by the knock of opportunity and the lift of an upswing, even at their most severe and baggage-heavy. Driscoll sings like a glowing beacon, rallying others around her self-love cause, spreading her hard fought warranty and wisdom onto trail blazing biscuits, smearing away the smirks of cynicism and manifesting a revolutionizing sandwich of supportive endearment.

Whereas “Let Me Be Your Angel” (From 2000’s “The Play”) is a request for love that makes a disarmingly forward pitch for an unlimited massage of pursuit, followed by the groove of ongoing congruence, “The Rest” is the long awaited next chapter. Exploring the healing process for when love’s flame flickers out, and fronted by tempestuous, flustered piano and a festering past that won’t budge, “The Rest” examines the side effects of dissolved connectivity. It asks: How do you regain the resources needed for self-care, a crucial next step post-breakup, when you feel you have exhausted your bank of love on your heart’s former muse? It ponders: How are you supposed to love yourself, when the love that you dished out to your ex seems to stand as a gassed, historic landmark, and when your emotional capacities are broke?

In “The Rest”, Driscoll works to make peace with her leftover anguish that was previously closeted like a not yet unpacked storage box. It is evident that by this point she is enough removed from the thick of the distress, to be able to report on the hurt without flinching into slippery turmoil’s comeback. The distance she has acquired from the events depicted in ‘The Rest” allows her the luxury of reflection first: the chance to consider the takeaway from her experiences, and offer commentary coming from a less fragile field. This is unlike the scenario of “Let Me Be Your Angel”, where you can hear that she is knee deep in the struggles of the storm, and that she is extensively dependent upon interpersonal love to make it through.

“The Rest” thrives on providing a glimpse into what it feels like to be dealt an unfixable blow of finality in a relationship, without turning into a rueful, regretful revisiting of an already poached past. “The Rest” uses the disharmonious tension productively, to zero in on the importance of moving forward and reclaiming autonomy of the self through activities of self-improvement and mending. Even when she recounts the time when a relationship’s unhinging led to the diminishing of her inner light, the emphasis is placed on restoring her own psyche’s calmer waters.  Her words reveal a shattered preoccupation, but also a great determination to get on with it and attain a balanced outlook. “Time heals the wounds but not the scars/Close my eyes and there you are/And it’s getting hard to breathe/Cause when you left/You took the best of me/And now there’s nothing left of me.” Driscoll is well versed in the damage done by a relationship’s ending, but she seems less interested here in venting or head hanging, and is instead focused on using the fizzle out as fuel to advance her own narrative along a forward thinking, healthier trajectory.  More than anything, she wants to get back to a place where there is more than “nothing left” of her, so she can experience more of what life has to offer.

“Cinderella Left the Ball” is an ode to persevering with your own handpicked settings, in a world where others ask you to cater to their possibly limiting conceptions of you. “Cinderella Left the Ball” reinforces the permission you granted to yourself to invent and reinvent yourself on your own terms. It is a song about subverting outward expectations, and learning to revel in your quirky distinctions, to breed a boosted plane of existence. “So they built you a box but you just didn’t fit/So they built you a wall/You climbed over it/Tried to put you in a tower/But you just ran away/Tried to tell you what to think/Tried to tell you what to feel/Tried to tell you who to be/But that just wasn’t real/They’ll never see you/Cause they’re looking the other way.” Here, Driscoll reminds you that you are the author of your persona’s dictionary.  “Cinderella Left the Ball” expresses that your curvy scribble of character and the penmanship of your heart are special and valuable because they are uniquely yours.  The arrangements in “Cinderella” are flamboyant and therapeutic at once, as energetic yet unthreatening waves envelope your dormant shoreline of solitude, bringing the beach’s tight-lipped mouth to life with a crackling cackle.

It is not coincidental that the third track on “The Play” is titled “Beautiful Disaster” and the third track on “Glass Slipper” is titled “Beautiful.” Ditching the disaster aspect of “Beautiful Disaster” and its dramatic underpinnings, and having gained enormous insight into what she wants to receive from love in the decade and a half stretch that stands between the two tracks, “Beautiful” raises the standards to which she holds love up to.  In “Beautiful”, Driscoll documents her discovery that she is worthy of a high calibre love. She realizes that she is not willing to settle for anything less than an illustrious, evolving love that hoists through the calendar’s turning pages, hand in hand. Driscoll wants an unshakable bond not disturbed by a pendulum’s swing, and the changes it brings. “When my mind is gone/And my memory fades/And I can barely speak your name/When my legs are tired/And my hands won’t write/And my hair has all turned grey/You’ll smile at me and say I can’t see one single wrinkle on your face/And you’ll tell me I’m beautiful.” Musically, “Beautiful” features symmetrical acoustic guitar jiving with spot rotations of piano flurries, and Driscoll’s voice parleying and forecasting at its illustrative, suggestive climax. The composure of her singing slant on her previous album “365 Days” gives way to a more penetrating, immersed delivery throughout “Beautiful." The newfound vocal intensity extends throughout Glass Slipper” in its entirety, which contributes to the new album carrying itself in a bolder poise than Driscoll’s work has ever before achieved.

On each Randi Driscoll album, we tend to get one slivered love song for the ages; a song that hangs in the balance somewhere between the feelings of being stifled and sought. On “Glass Slipper”, it’s the weathered, but unflagging “Kiss Me (Like Never Before).” Her piano fizzes with the nerve of unsettled soda water, with its bubbles of deficiency bobbing for outright domestication. Even as her words appear encouraged by the budding moment of mouths melding in the name of fondness, there are breaths of disenchantment exhaled. There is an unresolved quality to Driscoll’s voice here, as if baggage came calling mid kiss, demanding attention, disrupting the avid romance.  “Kiss Me (Like Never Before)” follows Driscoll’s tension between on one hand, wanting to trust her instincts about love, and on the other hand, not wanting to be led astray by attraction’s hold.

“Surrender” adds deep voiced male accompaniment (in the form of Aaron Parker) to the equation, as he duets with Driscoll over vapour-like piano that sways like a slow dance. Parker’s voice presents itself with a country twang in tow, and the song propels Driscoll a flight away from her comfort zone. “Surrender” continues Driscoll’s quest throughout the album to reclaim accountability for the wellbeing of her own heart. When she sings “I’ve been crying these tears so long/My eyes won’t dry/Can barely breathe, can barely hold on/Since we said goodbye/So, I’m going to drive all night/So I can try to make this right”, she acknowledges that while another person does have the power to pull her apart at the seams, she has it in her to lift herself back up on her own, without needing to rely on someone else for healing.  In “Surrender”, Driscoll claims ownership for her own emotional prosperity, recognizing that she can initiate a late night drive and enjoy her own company, to cope and find inner peace after a love lapse. In “Surrender”, Driscoll discovers the vast influence she has on her own state of mind, and how comforting such a revelation can be.

Musically, “The One That Got Away” is a brisker surge of backbone. Supple strings nod like a yes-man, as if to consent approvingly to the personal fortitude she has accumulated through being coached by reality. There is a moment where Driscoll comes to terms with the idea that “Sometimes you’re the one that gets left behind/Sometimes you’re the one that left.” She makes this proclamation in a level headed, non judgmental way that shows a grown up lack of resentment towards those that left her behind. “The One That Got Away” is her moment of awareness that the sting of having been let go by past loves now feels more absorbable and bearable, having lived through the experience of letting past loves of hers go herself. It is if Driscoll recognizes here that doing the work to have an amicable relationship with the unresolved shades of her past will be beneficial to her forthcoming adventures. “The One That Got Away”, then, comes back to the empowerment of self-love, as Driscoll realizes that having a healthy frame of mind about past relationships will allow her to be able to devote more brain space to her current relationship, which will allow for her life elevator to climb to a new, previously padlocked floor of happiness.

“No Song” dials back the activity level musically to allow for Driscoll to disclose a struggle with writer’s block after losing a loved one. The song narrates how Driscoll felt like there was no tune she could write that could adequately capture the spirit of her departed friend, and how much that friend of hers meant to her. She felt like her writing just couldn’t live up to the exquisiteness of her friend, but yet she kept trying to write a song in her friend’s honour, because her lost loved one was worth the endless attempts and piles of scrapped material.

Driscoll sings “No tune, no chorus good enough/No song good enough/This time”, and even as her voice feels frayed, us listeners feel proud of her that she persevered and found a way to productively channel her creativity into a touching song that does manage to honour and exude the persona and heart of her friend that passed. “No Song” is proof that turning to our creative voices in the thick of hard events can help us bulk up our muscles of action, to help us find our way back to the path of headway. As Driscoll learns with “No Song”, despite the challenges she faced in getting back in the songwriting saddle after her loss, it was her decision to keep at it during the backslide that allowed her to eventually have a creative surge, and write a song that not only revered her friend, but also helped take the pain and transform it into something much more contributing and purposeful long term: the music of believing.  “No Song” proves that Driscoll’s bout of writer’s block was a setback, not a squashing of her faith. In “No Song”, Driscoll perseveres and winds up creating high art with reach. With “No Song”, she was able to connect with the being that needed to be reached the most: herself.

Beginning with a jangly, chiming guitar, and later incorporating some soft-spoken but floral piano tinkering, “You’re My Everything Will Be Ok” is a toasty blanket for the frigid nights where your breath’s numbed shadow is visible in plain sight. Driscoll conforms her voice to playfully mimic a frazzled brain saturated in soiled, fruitless gunk. Driscoll attempts to unclog the overcrowded mind in question, by poking fun at how littered, muddled her thoughts can get. She hopes to laugh the worriment right out of her with her comedic imitation of the mayhem of her mental faculties. Her strategy is a success, as “You’re My Everything Will Be Ok” excludes anxiety from the guest list of her life festivities. It is evident how far Driscoll has come, when she asserts “You’re my little cream in my coffee in the morning time.” Arguably directed towards her husband, the line finds Driscoll seeing her husband’s love as a cherry on top of an already sweet life, not a prescribed crutch for her survival. Even as she tells her husband that “you’re all that matters”, Driscoll reminds us that ultimately, “cream in (her) coffee” (in this case, her relationship with her husband) is the support, not the sustenance.  

In “You’re My Everything Will Be Ok”, Driscoll diagnoses romantic love as a bonus perk that is made possible by being on side with her own lowdown, and having a strong rapport with her own scenes from living.  This is substantive progress for a musician who sixteen years ago was soliciting for answers, inquisitively querying in her 2000 track “Tell Me”, in a huff, how to format love into its most operative shape, as if her livelihood depended on receiving an adequate response. “Tell me, is there something I can say?” she sang, wanting so badly to remodel her then-relationship like a house upgrade, to take her to her chosen destination. With “You’re My Everything Will Be Ok”, Driscoll comes full circle by remodelling her own life first to a place of self-affirmation and settlement, and then allowing an innately right relationship to tack onto her already heady tally of triumphs, and be the extra prop up for good measure air pump to her self-surmounted inflatable mattress.

If much of  “The Play” is about feeling the snags of a desired but ultimately not right relationship in real time, dragging your feet and all, and if “You’re My Everything Will Be Ok” is the later moment when you realize that you have now found the right person to share your life with, then “Better With You” is playing during the closing credits. It is the daily rejoicing that happens after the happily ever after scene. It is the giddiness that comes with sharing your life with the right person. It is about when life’s next act measures up to the promise forecasted by the happily ever after scene. “Better With You” is the payoff. It’s the proceeds from all the self-improvements made, the tough blows faced, the experiences gathered, and the impediments overcome. A large part of what sweetens “Better With You” is that for Randi Driscoll, arriving at the loftiness of love is such an earned feat. When you listen to “Better With You”, you can hear how hard fought Driscoll’s newfound paradise was. You can feel all that she had to go through to get here. In ‘”Better With You”, you can hear the relief setting in and spreading, but you can also hear the rattle of past checkpoints she had to silence, to reap the love she knew she deserved.

In her 2000 ballad “My Turn” (from “The Play”), Driscoll is calling out to the universe, canvassing for a stroke of improved fortune in the love department. “I’ve been waiting for my turn/I’ve been waiting for mine,” she sang, with a downright heartbreaking yearning.  She was pining for love’s real deal, then, a highly relatable want. Sixteen years later, it is as if her prayers are finally being answered with ‘Echo Coming Home”, when she harmonizes with Zach to provide a first rate demonstration on the incentives of fullness; the tingling flush involved in graduating from a solo lifestyle to a dazzling duo that dishes out love daily to one another. In “Echo Coming Home”, Driscoll and Zach bind their voices to each other snugly, like the long awaited supply of love finally being shipped, long after placing the order. They sing to pronounce the glory of lovers hearing each other and understanding each other soundly. “From a million miles away/I hear what you’re saying/If the mountains don’t get in the way/I hear what you’re playing/If I close my eyes tonight/Will you hear me praying/Could you sing me to sleep in a dream/Is it real as it seems/Or is my echo coming home.”  “Echo Coming Home” is a testament to that walkie talkie signal that doesn’t cut out due to interference, or grow finicky due to static. It is a track that stands for when the walkie talkie voice transmissions are not just detectable, but rather wholly audible. “Echo Coming Home” is her turn that she was awaiting on “My Turn.” “Echo Coming Home” is the song that reveals the worthwhileness of holding out for when the constellation of connection is not just visible, but incandescent.

Finale “Maybe” broods with purpose. The mood is bent but not broken. It seeks to achieve acceptance and thriving with connectivity’s changing tide, rather than fight against the oft choppy shifts. It is so touching when Driscoll acknowledges a past relationship’s lasting influence on her, when she sings “Maybe we’re not over/We’re just breathing without each other/Till we realize what we had and what we lost." By honouring the prior relationship’s stronger points, and taking note of but not harping on its weaknesses, she is allowing herself to be an open book, finally free from the constraints of the unresolved.  This resolution also is beneficial to her current relationship, as it allows her to give and receive love without holding back. 

In “Maybe”, Driscoll offers us a generous summary of the overall message of “Glass Slipper": That there will always be beginnings and endings, and comings and goings, but what truly matters is the growth that our experiences spark in us.  It is a huge epiphany generating moment when Driscoll hopes that “Maybe when we’re finished, we’ll be better than we started” as she is choosing to focus not on a relationship’s outcome, but on the indelible mark that a relationship made. How fitting that after spending much of “The Play” pining for the ideal relationship, Driscoll wraps up “Glass Slipper” by learning how to have an abundant, substantial relationship with her own self.  And as for that epic romantic love that she dreamed about on “The Play”, she obtains that too, by being with someone who marvels at the mountain of self-love she has going for her, and wants to add to it, because loving himself would amount to witnessing her happiness.  Sixteen years later, “The Play” gets its happy ending, and “Glass Slipper” proclaims that Driscoll has self-love to thank.