Tara Jane O'Neil- self-titled album review
Written by Nat Bourgon
August 6th 2017
Tara Jane O’Neil has an
unforgettable, special presence about her that draws listeners into her
love-lit, luminous space of sincerity and openness. O’Neil is a free spirit,
and her songs depict her nomadic lifestyle of curiosity and exploration. Her
sounds emit a patience and repose, while endorsing a striving, active, playful,
experiential approach that envisions life as a string of adventures worth
taking part in.
Listening to Tara Jane’s
music is a spiritual experience. Her music has a cleansing, therapeutic virtue;
it filters out the blame and bemoaning, and invites you to try to become
friends with your own self. When I hear Tara’s celestial, remedying vocal chord
vibrations correspond with her wavy, uninhibited passages of sound, I feel as
though I am consorting with angels, soaking up their sage discernments on
freedom, balance and alignment.
On her new 2017 self-titled
album, O’Neil consciously lets her voice make the leap from supporting
instrument rafting in a pond of talkative guitar parts to headlining act with a vibrant soundboard and a
higher microphone volume level, providing her tunes with
assurance and decisiveness. Partially recorded at the renowned studio “The
Loft” (Wilco’s studio) in Chicago, Tara Jane’s songs feel bolder and more
amplified this time around, like the sound of a cliffhanger being untangled, the
suspense resolving into clarity, the question marks discovering their answers.
Tara Jane’s songs recalibrate
my agenda to consent to change’s alterations while putting up less resistance
to the resulting incongruent tilts. O’Neil’s work sustains my quests, cements
my bond with truth, energizes my means to pursue longstanding dreams, and
simplifies my feelings.
O’Neil is a leader worth
marching behind in unequivocal support of. To me, her songs stand for the art of seeking,
the fascination and euphoria that dwells in passionate pursuits, and the
ripples that possibility makes. O’Neil’s music has taught me about how love is
a constant seesaw between acceptance and invention; of embracing reality’s
structuring caveats and utilizing imagination’s inexhaustible enthusiasm for
transformation. In O’Neil’s music, there can be harmony in precarious postures,
and there can be heavenly hugs in the midst of testing hurdles.
Sharing a kinship of directness with her 2000 debut “Peregrine”, Tara Jane O’Neil’s self-titled album models
how to push the envelope forward and evolve with the ambitious hankering and
aspiring gusto of a flower immersed in the sprouting stage of a
coming-of-age flick, the bloom season now and ongoing. That she is able to be
such a proponent of assortment and range, while being faithful to her musical
wardrobe of coherence that she has been stylishly sporting since the early 90s
is an indicator of O’Neil’s uniqueness and importance in the contemporary
scene, in both music and in life. O’Neil’s songs make hope more feasible; they
make love more conceivable. These are songs worth believing in; songs about
what it takes to believe.
