Digging Deeper: Mary Spender’s Super. Sexy. Heartbreak.

Welcome back to Digging Deeper, where I tend to go deep into a music genre (such as, say, funk) or a career (like Cory Wong’s). However, you may have noticed that I don’t tend to do single album reviews really, outside of capsule reviews with the monthly roundup of what I’m listening to.  No real planned reason for that, just the way life shakes out.

Every now and then, though, an album demands a much closer look.

So it is with Mary Spender’s newest release Super. Sexy. Heartbreak.

I’ve been a fan of Spender’s for years, following her YouTube channel and listening to her various musical releases. The channel is highly recommended as her thoughts on music (both creation and industry), as well as songs both cover and original, are very much worth your time.

But why stop and review this album specifically? I keep wanting to say that this album is “something different” but it isn’t really, so much as it is an evolution that you can get a sense of through her YouTube channel and listening to her thinking and hearing her play. Even so, even knowing all that, this one is something special.

There’s an overall tone of sadness mixed with a wistful hope toward growing into someone who embraces a world not yet here, held back by fear and concern. And yet musically the album soars in defiance of that fear, reaching track to track, toward that hoped for world.

Spender’s voice is, as always, deft and accomplished. She can play in a wide range of vocal styles and tones, deploying them with a precision that organically matches the moment to moment needs of every song.

Matching that is her guitar playing skillfully teasing out emotion and melody in the equal temperament. Her deft finger style playing has really been honed over the last few years and it feels as if this album is what her hands have been waiting for.

The production on the album as a whole is also noteworthy, bringing everything together fully, never becoming intrusive, as some production certainly can, but rather knowing when to lean in and when to step back a bit, creating an overall soundscape that lets each song take its place on stage without being beholden to the others in a rigid systematic way that could collapse the feeling of the whole.

But that’s a big overview look. Let’s take a smaller gaze at the songs in specific. I won’t go into each and every song, but I do want to stop to discuss some highlights.

You Can Have Chicago is built with echoes of Fleetwood Mac in the guitar and instrumentation, with lyrics that Christine McVie would appreciate. “You can have Chicago back just for a little while, I’ll be coming back in style” is a wonderful bit of concession with implied threat, showing the strength of the narrator, while never having to feel heavy about it. It’s a hell of a way to open an album.

Do You Wanna Play is a driving force of a song, the sound of the snare just pushing and pushing you forward, while the guitar on the chorus pulls the beat back a bit transforming the song into to a galloping effect while still building tension perfectly for the release of the verses. Those verses manage to sit back and let you ride the waves of vocals rising and falling, which matches the guitar. The whole song just ebbs and flows with purpose, as a cohesive, living, thing.

Putting Make Me an Offer in the middle of the album really nails down the themes of the album, as it starts slow, building and rising toward the end. Along the way it is in turns pleading and daring. A narrator in search of certainty while admitting a sense of shame and the loss of a way forward.

Church Bell is in the spirit of Dire Straights musically, but does its own thing with the tone, weaving in an almost gospel sensibility with Spender’s voice, searching and grasping for the emotional core of the song, clutching it on the high notes then dropping into a lower register for a grounding before taking off and rising again. It’s the sort of thing that can sound exhausting in concept but in practice just takes you for the ride it intends and never wears you out.

Drop. Drop. Slow Tears, Drop is a jazzy number from beat to vocals that almost feels like it might not belong to the rest of the album at first, musically. As it progresses though, you get a sense of it as another facet of what you’ve been witnessing to that point. Lyrically the song never wavers from the sense of the album as a whole, which helps your sense of belonging, in terms of the album itself. Then, when the guitar growls about halfway through into a slide solo the song elevates itself again and really earns a place not only on the album itself, but also in a dark, small, club, as a new found jazz ballad standard.

I’ll Stay Quiet closes things out with a strong song of acceptance that isn’t the expected end to an album like this, and yet it is the perfect ending. It’s an admitting of loss, and the past. The knowledge that you can’t recapture what was. Even if you both moved on to a better place, that doesn’t mean you should go back and try again. Sometimes the best move is to just embrace the hurt caused and felt, and be the new you, in a different, better, and stronger place.

Overall Super. Sexy. Heartbreak. is a triumph of an album. You can find tracks dropping slowly on Spotify and Apple Music I believe, and at least the first track is on Bandcamp. You can also order the physical release at Spender’s store, and I highly recommend you do.