The first decade in the career of Nashville art-medium dabbler, cabaret-tinged singer-songwriter, redhead and stage presence Aubryn, launching out of California, saw a couple of live concert recordings, a six-track debut EP—Nothing Civil—a 2018 Christmas collection, and other DIY single releases. There’s also a ghostly duet, “You Haunt Me,” produced and performed with England-based singer-songwriter Matty Twigg, and “Struggle,” co-written for a werewolf movie.
All of this leads up to Aubryn’s latest offering, Live at Needle Drop Music Fest, recorded in Lebanon, Tennessee, Sept. 17, 2022, and released online this March. This one actually contains the most original material from the artist collected in a single release.
The live album teases a “storytellers” aspect with Aubryn’s between-song banter, but don’t misinterpret it as a cumulative collection; the majority of the nine Americana/cabaret-esque, indie-folk-rock (sometimes dark) tracks have not been previously recorded and released.
Aubryn delivers in this production a honed, soulful vocal, lyrically inspired by the fantastic and mythological just as much as by a bluesy cabaret, captured in the nature of a live show setting, imperfections and all.
The two previously released tracks open the set, starting with “Nothin’ Civil,” a mid-tempo, bluesy acoustic strummer with Aubryn’s palm-muting and guitar-body percussion backing her solo songbird vocals; the seductively well-timed throaty blues would fit on the Lilith Fair stage. She wrote “Gonna Get It” using an old episode of The Twilight Zone for inspiration (“Purple Testaments” is the episode, about some wraith-y glow).
Aubryn exudes a hell of a vocal range and tactful placement in “Spirits,” originally released under the name Madame Poltergeist due to the production vibe being so different from her usual folky Americana stuff; she instructed her recording team to make it “sound like Evanescence,” though the track here sounds like someone in a coffee shop doing a cooler, funnier cover of a pop song you’d find in a viral video, with a certain sweetness added.
The Lilith Fair inspiration blends with filk music (played by a sub-culture of writers who share, write and sing science fiction and fantasy-inspired works at sci-fi conventions) on “Frankenstein.” Aubryn says the song is “my letter to Frankenstein;” it’s seemingly written from an observation point of someone sitting outside the monster’s cage saying, “dude, you look pretty messed up. I see you.” The emotive blues-discipline tactics were not used as heavily this song, but it’s wild the fan fiction that comes out of these folks.
“Medusa” can be considered filk as well, by the artist’s own proclamation, this one written as a letter to Medusa, mythologically a beautiful refugee taken advantage of by Poseidon and then punished for it. It’s a sympathetic sentiment as well as a graceful acoustic work from the backyard setting of The Needle Drop Fest utilizing rich sevenths and minors. It sounds great.
Continuing the mythology and monster theme, another tune turns to the villain of The Little Mermaid. What if the mermaid was a siren, Aubryn speculates. “Sirens lure sailors to their deaths with their voices . . . what if maybe the sea-witch wasn’t so bad after all? Maybe, she was trying to save the prince’s life by taking away [Arial’s] voice, which was her weapon, right?”
As filky as Aubyrn gets, though, she has some pipes, following the path of Norah Jones, Sheila Nicholls and Nellie McKay, also tapping into bird chirps from a maelstrom.
Drawing from real-world events, a spooky folk tune, “Knots (Towards the Philippines)” comes from a true story of an ’80s seaman friend of Aubryn’s serving on the U.S.S. Poel, traveling the Indian Ocean at 15 knots. He spotted something that flew out of the water to perch on the ship’s hand railing before jumping back in. To the same friend, a few years later, it happened again. Aubryn determined the apparition/tiny leviathan(?) was haunting her friend enough to warrant a warning in song, so she folk’d out a well-flowing sea shanty/dark folk ballad.
Aubryn’s Live at Needle Drop Fest can be found on Spotify or at facebook.com/aubrynmusic, aubrynmusic.com or aubrynmusic.bandcamp.com. Aubryn is also re-recording her first album, “Nothin’ Civil,” because it’s evolved seven years later, according to Live at Needle Drop Fest’s interim banter.
