Lydia Loveless - Boy Crazy and Single​(​s) (2017)

Lydia Loveless is making a name for herself in the States with a mix of country, punk and alternative Southern rock and lyrics of scorching self-awareness. Boy Crazy was originally a five-strong EP, released in the summer and is now given a full album release with six songs added that have been recorded over the period 2012-2015 (which includes covers of Kesha, Prince and Elvis Costello). If you haven’t heard Loveless yet, then this is a great place to start, showing off her song-writing skills and a voice that conveys emotion straight to the heart or gut. She sings about yearning, loss and desire with a voice strong enough to convey every word, every breath with the gravitas of meaning and emotion.

The album takes us on a journey through the various stages of love. The good and the bad. Loveless sings about that all-consuming desire that lust or love can have over you. All I Know, a great raw-pop sound, describes that feeling of knowing you are being a fool but unable to break free. On All The Time, we feel the yearning and the pain of that moment of admitting that she can’t have him and to move on. And the dreadful hurting of knowing that it will never happen, but that it’s the first step towards recovery. Lover’s Spat describes the feeling of actually enjoying, and thinking it’s normal, to be in an abusive relationship. Boy Crazy is a great pop-punk-sounding song about that teenage feeling of desire and love that consumes a teenager’s hours. Water is a more mature song with a slower back-beat and Loveless’ voice so full of emotion that it settles into your brain and sends shivers down your backbone. It’s a genuine singer, exploring genuine emotions; a true voice drifting over the music to places where we cannot escape the emotion of memories, the auto-suggestion of sad songs, until we feel, like Loveless, that “it all comes back like we’re losing them again.”