Lynn Miles - Fall For Beauty

There's a particular mood that permeates the songs of Canadian singer/songwriter Lynn Miles. A feeling of hopelessness and despair that, oddly enough, doesn't actually sound like either. Maybe it's the lovely lilt of her voice or the exquisitely turned melodies but there's beauty to be found in the dark shadows of Miles' emotional bloodletting, a sense that even the most melancholy reaches of the human heart have warmth. Like contemporaries such as Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Gretchen Peters and Kim Richey, Miles creates personal musical vignettes that straddle contemporary folk and acoustic pop songwriting and reveal a depth of intelligent lyricism and maturity of approach that are light years beyond the latest twenty-something ingénue with an acoustic guitar.

Miles' upcoming Fall For Beauty (October 5, True North) is her first full-fledged studio effort since 2005's Love Sweet Love and the follow-up to 2008's stark and stripped Black Flowers I + II. Beauty once again weaves country tinged threads into Miles' folk/pop songs, from the "everything's broken or about to break" refrain of the opening "Something Beautiful" to the more hopeful closing track "Let the Sun Have Its Day". In between we get the heartbreaking song of domestic abuse ("Love Doesn't Hurt"), a gorgeous hymn of heartbreak ("Cracked and Broken") and the finger-picked lament on the end of a relationship ("Goodbye"), songs that confirm the NY TIMES observation that Miles "makes being forlorn sound like a state of grace".

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Lynn Miles - "Cracked and Broken" (from the album Fall For Beauty)

Lynn Miles - "I Will" (from the album Fall For Beauty)