Acoustic country tinged folk music doesn't come much gentler than this. Anna Elizabeth Laube sounds every bit as fresh and wholesome as she looks on the CD cover.
For her fourth album, establishing roots and connecting with nature are strong themes. The title track ,for instance, is inspired by a 100 year old maple that grew in the yard of her childhood home in Iowa.
Of the nine tracks, two are covers. b>Wallflower is a relatively obscure Dylan song that was released on the Bootleg Series Volumes 1 -3.
The other is a more familiar and slightly more surprising choice - Beyoncé's XO. This she radically simplifies to transform it into an altogether less raunchy love song.
Unlike Beyoncé, Laube's sexual metaphors are polite to the point of being embarrassingly coy. In her appeal to a Longshoreman she invited the seaman to "tie my ship up tight to your lighthouse light".
The romanticism shines brightest on the closing track All My Runnin', an ode to "love's eternal merciful grace" which features some fine pedal steel playing from Dan Tyack.
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The bright and breezy Sunny Days is right up Laube's street and she's also in her element on the piano ballad Please Let It Rain In California Tonight which is akin to musical prayer to relieve drought conditions.
The course of true love rarely runs smoothly so some balance is found in the heart tugging I Miss You So Much and the embittered laments of Lose, Lose, Lose.
While not everything is sweetness and light, the lonesome blues do not cast heavy shadows or affect the easy going mood.
Anna Elizabeth Laube's website
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