Mouths of Babes - World Brand New (2023)

World Brand New is the second album by Mouths of Babes, the California queer folk married duo Ty Greenstein (of Girlyman) and Ingrid Elizabeth (of Coyote Grace). The pair alternate leads and writing credits on a ridiculously infectious collection of Americana about navigating turbulent times and forging renewal. Featuring Michael Connolly on dobro, it opens with Greenstein’s title track, a joyous stomp celebrating the giddy feeling of being in love and that anything is possible (“I wanna sit with a guitar in a room/Just me and you/And forget everything we’re supposed to do/And play every song, we’ve known all along…I wanna think about better times/And how much love it takes to make the world brand new”).

Capturing the same feelings, featuring tubular bells, upright bass and trumpet, Elizabeth and on lead and strumming ukulele, that’s followed by her self-penned I Do, her jaunty wedding-themed love letter to her partner (“When I look at you I hear wedding bell alarm clocks in my head/I wanna chase you around the bed/Spread my jam on your homemade bread/We’ll stitch each and every day together/Wrap it around us it in the roughest weather/And stay tongue-tied forever”) as she declares “Of all the words that Webster ever knew/If I could only pick two: I do”.

Opening with Tania Elizabeth (no relation) from The Avett Brothers on violin and Mai Bloomberg on cello, with Elizabeth on upright bass, Connolly on piano and Sean Trischka’s puttering drums, things take a slower turn with Greenstein’s One For Me, another avowal of love amid life’s mysteries (“I don’t know if we’re souls and stardust/Or just biology/Seems the only thing I know/Is you’re the one for me”), that, again with cello, ebbs into Elizabeth’s spare hymnal piano ballad Set You Free, a stunning, soulful prayer to draw a line in the sand of generational trauma (“They all loved me best they could, though my best was seldom good/There was never another way for me/Oh my babies, I beseech you/Do as I say and not as I do/Of my blood, I wish to set you free/And may this sickness die with me…May you never do the damage I have done/May you never feel estranged/Held hostage by your rage”).

Greenstein picking guitar and singing, with Tania Elizabeth harmonising, Pictures Of You echoes the pain as it sketches being ghosted in a ruptured friendship (“what do I say when it’s you in my dreams and you’re still like a statue ignoring my pain?/And how do I answer the voice in my head when it tells me I must have deserved what you said?/And what do you say to a ghost anyway?”) and being forced to start over (“I am newly born to this world/Just like I was once in my mother’s arms/Made of flesh and trust/So, what do I do with these pictures of you and of us by the millions, in cars and in canyons?”), yet still closing on a note of hope that “I am still alive/Even with you gone”.

As the title suggests, the album’s only co-write, Jubilee is a more exultant number, Tania Elizabeth’s fiddle scorching through a Cajun romp with Connolly on accordion and Joe Chellman on washboard, that, as Greenstein explains takes the word’s origins in the ancient tradition of forgiving debts and is actually inspired by receiving a letter of apology and reconciliation from the subject in the previous track (“You were Machiavellian/How you refused to let me in/Or maybe just a real bad friend with too much history/And maybe now you’re worn and tired and life has left you uninspired /As lost as any used up tire in the middle of the heap/Or maybe your heart’s been found”) as she sings “This is how the Hero’s Journey goes/No one ever really knows/Who they’re gonna have to be/Just wait long enough and you’ll be free/In the Jubilee”.

Josh Yenne’s pedal steel, adding to the cello and violin, Greenstein wrote the slow countrified piano ballad Except For The Love for her grandparents, who were married for seventy-four years until “the day her maker came”, a celebration of how although “I’ve made my share of messes out of other people’s lives” ultimately, as the title says, nothing else mattered “Except for the love we gave each other”.

One of only two tracks to feature electric guitar, with Connolly on lap steel, opening with a sort of Spectorish drum thump, a meld of Lucinda Williams and Bobbie Gentry, the Southern sassy Summertime is Elizabeth’s love song homage to growing up queer in rural Southeastern Ohio (“I was a watercolor girl in a tintype town/The locals looked me up and down/Love to watch their heads spin when we come around/Me and my sweet baby…Stole my first kiss from me in the first grade”) that sports the inspired image “The underwear is dancing to a Patsy Cline song out on the laundry line/In a field of lightning bugs that put the country stars to shame”.

The last of the original material comes, coloured with cello, Hammond, piano, pedal steel and violin, with the album’s only political number, Greenstein’s five-minute plus My Country in which America is a friend who’s seen better days, starting with high ideals and “stars shining in your eyes… opening every door/To the tired and the poor” but then “fell asleep on the job and slept your way to the top“. The image is then extended to all those who let slip their best intentions (“I know each one of us/Has lost somebody’s trust/Despite all we thought we’d be”), reinforcing the album’s running theme of redemption with the song building to an anthemic swell as she sings “So put down your 300 million guns/The enemy you fear is staring back in the mirror/And the battles still left to fight are the ones deep inside/So don’t you give up just yet… Wipe the centuries from your face/I’ll help you clean up the place/If you can’t be a superstar/Just be more perfect than you are/Ain’t it worth one last shot to be the land of the free?“

The album ends with a gospel-fuelled cover of queer folk icon Holly Near’s I Am Willing, the other track with electric guitar, the choir arranged by Motown veteran Vicki Randle, succinctly summing up the album’s heart in the lines “I am open and I am willing/To be hopeless would seem so strange/It dishonors those who go before us/So lift me up to the light of change”. The duo’s name is taken from the old adage, essentially meaning a victory for common sense arising from a realisation of truth and wisdom; this outstanding album flies the flag for compassion, understanding and change, which we’d all do well to salute.