HAILEY WHITTERS - I'M IN LOVE
Country music's earthy songwriting-sweetheart Hailey Whitters put out her first EP in the last days of July, I'm In Love - a linked-arms walk through wildflower patches, a kitchen counter topped with homemade lemonade and freshly baked muffins, and a gas station under the stars.
2020's The Dream, her first release on her own record label Pigasus Records, strolls from peach-flavoured kisses to her hometown to sweet-tea and red-eyed blues, to a smokey, wandering soul. 2022's Raised is homier, planted in family soil, from dandelion-delicate diary entries to ginger-scented and whiskey-kissed living room jams to sheriff-starred country anthems.
I'm In Love's first track ‘Tie'r Down’ is daisy country-pop lead by Whitters' acoustic guitar, backed by a sugary drumbeat and banjo, and kissed with a violin. Using her folksy lyrical style, Hailey gives a warm account of a honey-sweet and cowboy-tough young woman not unlike herself - "She's got a baby doll face / But she's steel toe strong / She's got a mind of her own / A gold heart 'round her neck," "If you piss her off / You'll get a middle finger answer / She's a throwback classic / Like an old Loveless song." ‘Tie'r Down’ applauds those like the song's muse, and commands of their lovers, "If you don't love her at her worst / Then you don't get her at her best."
‘Countryside Chick’ is a Dolly Parton-esque ballad of twinkling stars and bluegrass, with Whitters' voice steady and rich, waltzing guitars, and deep, melancholy strings. Performed to a travelling man fond of telling stories about the city, Whitters laments the flashy artifices and little white lies of big city life. She gives word of the soft heavenliness of settling down in her community, calling to mind such vignettes of a quaint diamond and a barn wedding, afternoons of creamed tea on the front porch with her family, a backyard swimming pool and ice cream sundaes with good friends. If he could trade in fool's gold for her kind of future, then she would be all his.
‘I'm In Love’ is white sugar-sweet in subject and sound, the latter, baby pink, rhinestoned country-pop: Hailey's voice is smooth and high, her acoustic guitar is cheerily strum, and a country band happily joins in on the song's choruses. The songwriter lays out like photographs the gingham-aproned domesticity she has begun to take joy in and the times in the day when she is reminded of her beau, "Chicken's in the skillet, ice in the drink / Head's in the clouds, diamond's in the rough," "Tips in the apron, hair's in a braid,". A contemporary take on a kittenish love-song sung into a hairbrush around the house, Whitters' is so caught up in her blossoming romance that she reads up on astrology, gets too giddy after a little wine, and after a good date, tells her mama not to wait up.
On ‘Mellencamp,’ with the pen of Annie Proulx, Whitters' brings to life both a landscape - a dusty small-town in the Midwest, the parking lot of the local chapel at night, the glow of a gas station in the windshield - and a portrait - a causeless rebel in blue jeans and his dad's leather jacket, a wink and mischief in his eye. Through a heartland rock vocal arrangement and classic rock guitars and drums, and well-worn, tobacco-scented diary notes like, "You're my Jesus saves, my hell and back," "Your two-step on the spot, so Baptist parkin' lot," and, "How 'bout tonight I'll let you call me Diane?" the singer-songwriter pulls the listener into her days stole away in a bygone era of Americana.
‘Bad Boy’ interlocks the rugged, folksy sensibility and earthier, bluesy sound of Whitters' Pigasus albums with the EP's darling feel and romantic tone. To her earthier guitar strumming and backing brassy guitars and in a smokier voice helped out by delicate harmonies and giddy gang vocals, the singer weaves a tapestry of every time that her heart had been betrayed with sections including, "Had the weekend down in Panama City," "The one that burned me like a cigarette," and, "The weepin'-like-a-willow, makeup-on-your-pillowcase." With the sageness of a folk poet, Whitters' strings the heartaches in her lifetime and the life lessons learned from them into a wreath worn with pride, and in this case, jewelled with having eventually found that, "...good love / The want-it-so-bad love."
The EP's closing song ‘Everything She Ain't’ is lacy, twine-tied country-pop - softly plucked acoustic guitars, honeyed piano keys, a hoppy drumbeat, and sweet violin, with the reckless romanticism of Johnny Cash. Hailey's voice is tart like lemonade as she suggests with cherry-cola sweetness just how much of a better fit she is for the boy-next-door than his glass-slippered girlfriend: "The whiskey in your soda, the lime to your Corona / Shotgun in your Tacoma, the Audrey to your Hank." As if the flirtatious little sister to the earlier ‘Countryside Chick,’ Whitters and the apple-of-her-eye seem to go, laughing, from one hometown bar to the next, until the morning light.
Cat Joy
★★★★☆