3 Minute Song
Arielle Silver
LionsRoar Records
2000
12 tracks
There's an awkwardness about this release, a feeling that the artist is new and not yet steady on her feet. There's some obvious talent at work here, but it feels strained, as though the artist is perhaps trying too hard. This is a debut release, so with time Arielle Silver may gain the confidence and self-knowledge to be able to relax into her work.
In printed information received with 3 Minute Song, we are told that Silver wants to "share her earnest lyrics and yearnful voice with the acoustic folk world." This comment, most likely written by Silver herself, is a clue that Silver has not yet arrived at a clear vision of what she is doing. Silver may believe that, because she is performing with just voice and guitar, she is a folk singer. In fact, while this is clearly so called singer-songwriter material, it's quite removed from what many would consider folk music. If I had to categorize it at all, I would say that what Silver does is rather music-as-art or, more accurately, art-as-music.
According to her supplied information, Silver comes from "ten years of classical and renaissance woodwind studies," and has now "laid aside her wooden pipes" for a career writing songs and performing acoustic folk music. She had begun writing and performing her songs while still in the classical world, and at some level this influence still pervades her performance. Certainly there are gaps in her arrangements where one can almost hear the absent whistles, woodwinds, or strings.
The guitar is spare. Many acoustic artists tend to slash away at the guitar, filling every dead space with unnecessary chords. Silver tends, if anything, to go to the opposite extreme, leaving perhaps too much dead air. Her playing is interesting, making the guitar sound at times like a subdued bouzouki and at times like a rocker's heavy handed attempt to move from electric to acoustic guitar.
The performance is very dramatic. Silver's vocals are less Joan Baez than Roberta Flack, concerned less with musicality than with acting out the feeling at the heart of the words. Rather than a folk singer, Silver falls loosely into a group of songwriters who usually perform not with guitar but with piano, artists such as Tori Amos, Carole King (after she broke with rock and roll), or Carly Simon. If she approaches a folk sound at all, it's more like Janis Ian at her most dramatic.
Although she clearly comes from a background and education in music, Silver's work suggests that, rather than writing songs in the traditional sense, she is writing poems to be placed in a musical setting. This is reflected in the musical tracks which are, by her own admission in the case of at least one song, minimal. It's also reflected in the long-lined, angst-ridden verses which pass for song lyrics on this release. Listening to the songs on this release, rather than purely folk artists, I'm reminded more of writers like Leonard Cohen or Janis Ian who have successfully set their poems to music.
The words are still too self-conscious, the events still too personal and less than accessible, but the potential is there. The poetry here is sophomoric and sometimes a bit too derivative, but most of these lyrics could be made very powerful with a bit of polishing, especially if part of the fine-tuning process went into making them a bit more universal in their affect. This is the work of a talented artist in the act of becoming.
If I would take issue with any song on 3 Minute Song, it would be the title track. Symbolically, one could wonder why a song with that title would ever run out to four minutes and thirty-six seconds, but that's not the issue. Both in content and in performance, this song reflects Alannis Morrisette's "Your House" [the hidden a capella track on Jagged Little Pill], and it just doesn't stand up to the comparison. Morrisette's song is tightly written with a very focussed point of view, like a little movie. Silver's song seems uncertain of its point of view, and the story is equally unclear. The spare staccato guitar, rather than adding to the performance, simply serves as a distraction.
Arielle Silver is a young artist with a lot of room to grow. She's clearly competent both as a musician and as a writer of words. She has a powerful singing voice and vocal approach which in fact is what most had reminded me of Roberta Flack. The artist she has become is not bad, not bad at all. I look forward to discovering the artist she will grow to be. She has the potential. Now she has only to find her own artistic voice and develop it.
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