Matt Harlan - Raven Hotel (2014)

The 12 guests of Raven Hotel are songs that celebrate the bright sides of dark places. Like a tapestry hung in a flophouse window, they reveal the ordinary splendor of optimism and second chances. In the first three tracks alone we see a glitter-skinned dancer find salvation in a haze of fiddles and exhaust fumes, a drunken troubadour quoting T.S. Eliot to justify his wandering, and an absent father finally teaching his kid to drive. Throughout this album, Matt Harlan makes the mundane magical.