Kassi Valazza opens “Roll On”, a meditative country-tinged ballad from her third album, with a stark realisation: “I’ve made up my mind, I feel like I do”, she asserts over a slow-motion two-step rhythm and thick brushstrokes of pedal steel and fiddle. “And if I feel like I do, I’ll try moving on”.
Kassi Valazza opens “Roll On”, a meditative country-tinged ballad from her third album, with a stark realisation: “I’ve made up my mind, I feel like I do”, she asserts over a slow-motion two-step rhythm and thick brushstrokes of pedal steel and fiddle. “And if I feel like I do, I’ll try moving on”.
Her voice is a high, sharp lilt that brings to mind Joan Baez or Carolyn Hester or other folk singers from the ’60s and ’70s, with a gentle vibrato and a gift for windswept phrasing. She sings like the breeze is scattering her syllables like leaves. “Roll On” is a break-up song – with a lover perhaps, but more likely with a city – but she instills the song not with resentment or sadness, but a precarious excitement for a new beginning.
From Newman Street is an album full of chapters closing and new ones opening, created by a singer-songwriter who embellishes her folky observations with psychedelic flourishes and knowing nods to the past. It is also, she says, a tale of two cities. Valazza wrote a little more than half of these new songs in a small basement apartment in Portland, Oregon, working in seclusion before joining her trusted touring band to record at a local studio.
She’s been a fixture in that city’s folk scene for a decade, gradually finding her voice and refining her sound. Her 2019 debut, Dear Dead Days, sounds like Patsy Cline sitting in with The International Submarine Band: a vivid combination of twangy torch vocals and feral psych guitars. That album heralded a wave of young Pacific Northwest country artists, including Margo Cilker and Riddy Arman, but cosmic country was a starting point rather than a destination, and she drifted towards a stately strain of folk rock on her 2022 EP “Highway Sounds” and her 2023 sophomore album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing.
The latter paired her with the Portland rabble-rousers TK & The Holy Know-Nothings, who certainly roused some rabble on her songs and exposed a live wire in her vocals. Its finest moment, however, was her mostly solo reimagining of Michael Hurley’s “Wildegeeses”, which she sang like she was missing some remote piece of land very dearly. As confident as she sounded on record, Valazza suffered from stage fright, depression and social anxiety that was very isolating even in a city full of friends and fans.
Hoping a change of scenery might alleviate those concerns, in early 2024 she returned from a long tour and immediately packed up her guitars and records and headed east. Her plan was to settle in Nashville, but she overshot and ended up in New Orleans. She quickly learned she couldn’t outrun her demons, but new surroundings inspired new songs as well as new perspectives on old songs.
Valazza took this second batch to Portland and finished the album, although there’s no Side One/Two split between her Oregon songs and her Louisiana songs. Instead, she wisely mixes them together to reflect a certain kind of wanderlust that has always motivated her music but feels more acute and certainly more conflicted on From Newman Street.
These songs are perched somewhere between home and away: the warmth of her bed and the lure of the larger world. That is, of course, the clash faced by any musician who makes her living playing songs in different cities every night. With its gently percolating percussion and nimble bassline, “Your Heart’s A Tin Box” is a touring lament that’s disarmingly matter-of-fact in its misgivings: “Two months of selling out most of the shows/ I’d sure like to see where all that money goes”, she sings, before building to a moment of stark self-reckoning, where she hopes “they like the way you sing”. She ends the songwith a chorus of “you think too much”, which sounds like the punchline to a grim joke.
She addresses most of these songs to “you”, which sounds more like “I”, as though each song is a pep talk or a warning addressed to Valazza’s future self. Her Portland bandmates, many of whom have been playing long before Valazza even arrived in the city, provide breezy accompaniment to her breezy melodies, instilling songs like “Your Heart’s A Tin Box” and “Market Street Savior” with the motion of travel.
Erik Clampitt’s pedal steel traces the line of the horizon in the distance, while the rhythm section of drummer Ned Folkerth and bassist Sydney Nash count off the highway lines one by one. Favouring arrangements that highlight one instrument – the muted Byrdsy guitar theme on “Market Street Savior”, the billowy organ blowing through “Small Things”, but most of all Valazza’s deft guitar picking – they never crowd her songs, but leave lots of open, empty space. That lends the album a gentle melancholy, nothing too dark, but these songs all sound like they’re meant to be heard while staring out the car window during a long road trip.
In its sense of motion and its travelogue sensibility, the album sounds like a millennial update to Hejira, Joni Mitchell’s mid-’70s document of her local travels along American highways. Both albums are sharp, complex, slightly elusive and offhandedly funny. “Some say you look like your father”, Valazza sings on “Small Things”, “but me, I’ve never met your father”. It’s a line overflowing with implications.
Hejira is full of dalliances and encounters, but Valazza’s album is lonelier, directed inward rather than outward, stuck inside her own head. It’s a fascinating place to be, not least because she’s so strenuous in her self-interrogation. These songs never let her off the hook. She also peppers her lyrics with references to geographical landmarks: not just Newman Street but St John’s Park on “Shadow Of Lately” and Market Street on “Market Street Savior”. They’re like breadcrumbs to mark her path, or perhaps just a means of getting out of her own head, if only for a line or two.
If there’s one landmark she names most often, it’s her own bed, which is even featured on the album cover. This is the place where she can retreat into solitude. “All things look the same from the pillow on my bed”, she sings on “Weight Of The Wheel”, which has a bit of the folk-rock elegance of The Band. “I’m stressed out, I’m far away/ There’s a dizzy dancing in my head”.
Or, as she sings on opener “Birds Fly”, “It’s so nice to have a bed and watch the trees grow”. That song begins with a hallucinogenic intro before fading into a quiet arrangement that foregrounds Valazza’s voice and guitar, her thumb picking out a pendulum on the low strings. The album concludes not far from where it starts, with the spare title track set, ironically, back in Portland. It’s a kitchen-sink reverie, an idle reminiscence while she washes the dishes.
“Wishing you well from Newman Street”, she muses. “How is the weather on the open sea?/ Now I sit here all alone, keeping control”. Both musically and lyrically, From Newman Street is Valazza’s strongest, boldest and most vivid expression of emotional restlessness, but it’s also a search for stable ground and a nice view – some place or person or mood that feels like home.
