Ever More Nest - The Place That You Call Home (2021)

Named after a line from a poem by Marj Ann Samyn, The Place That You Call Home is a new project by New Orleans singer-songwriter Kelcy Mae, produced by Neilson Hubbard and featuring Will Kimbrough on guitar, Grand Ol’ Opry in-house fiddler Eamon McLoughlin and Kenny Hutson on pedal steel.

Mae says the songs explore her place in relationships, with others, the world and where she lives, opening with the rural twilight feel of Unravelling, Joshua Britt on banjo, a song of wonder at the world and the paths it offers.

Showcasing Hutson, the ambling So Low is equally laid back as it muses as she sings how she doesn’t “have much patience to burn and these tables never turn”, the pace picking up for North Mississippi with its physical and metaphorical images of fallen trees holding on to green leaves. She widens her horizons to the cosmos, referencing Bowie’s Space Oddity with Major Tom, a fingerpicked folk song about trying to find an anchor when you feel disconnected and out of control.

Again touching on a loss of control Kimbrough’s guitar brings a weightier musical feel to the introspective I Wish I, Mae’s voice taking a tremulous edge to its slightly twangsome warble, while it’s Hubbard’s circling drum pattern that underpins her folksy tones on the rain-washed, sadness-streaked Broken Bones, inspired perhaps by the New Orleans floods. A theme of addiction – drugs, drink, fame, runs through the otherworldly atmospherics of the bluesy semi-spoken Gimme That, the mood and the song’s structure capturing the never-ending cycle.

A slow strings-laced waltz with a hint of Nanci Griffith, Paper Dolls builds to a swelling electric guitar climax and final ebb carrying along its lyric of fixation and emotional dystopia, leading to the relationship shift (“she doesn’t see you like she used to”) of Fine Right Here (This Time Next Year) with its sense of someone trying to hold on to who they are, trapped in the amber of her life (“How many times have you said I’m finally happy. And how many times have you realized you’re not?”).

The album ends on the simple lullabying acoustic waltz Town With One Horse, the previous doubts, regrets and hurt giving way to the tentatively upbeat dreams and fantasies of “miracles and redemption”, of finding true love and “babies and romance and plants on the porch”, even if, in a wry twist, it means taking fate into your own hands and him taking his vows while “the pistol’s under my bouquet.”

The press release says her songs ask the question ‘Just where do I belong?” The answer is clearly in any discerning Americana CD collection.