A Girl Called Eddy, where you been?

Have you ever loved a record so much that you found yourself, perversely, almost hoping that its follow-up isn't quite as good, as you don't want that beloved record to be supplanted in your affections? Ok, that might just be me, but anyway, this is how I felt about the self-titled debut album by Erin Moran, aka A Girl Called Eddy, which arrived fully-formed in 2004, a collection of songs of quite staggering beauty and quality, suffused with a transcendent melancholy, and sung in an understated croon by a singer who knew exactly when and how much to let soar the power she had, while for the most part keeping her vocals sweet, low and unadorned.

I certainly had plenty of time to nurture my strange, proprietorial love for that debut, as it is only now, 16 years later, that the follow-up has arrived. And goodness me, but it's simply glorious. The melancholy is still there, but it has evidently decided to put on its glad rags and bloody well go out there and have a good time. The arrangements are expansive, with punchy horns largely replacing the spectral strings of the debut, superb backing vocals painstakingly deployed (by Erin herself) for maximum impact, and with choruses that throw their arms wide open in a style that would surely earn a nod of approval from one of her idols Burt Bacharach.

After the opening title song, a wryly named answer to the question that is the first sound we hear ("Girl, where you been"?), and My Big Mouth, the first of several gorgeous ballads that hark back to the debut, the new, extroverted direction of Erin's songwriting brilliance is signalled by Jody, a lovingly drawn character portrait ("sketch" doesn't do justice to the level of detail) of an old friend who was, we can gather, a sometimes irascible man with an eye for the ladies and many a tale to tell. There is a distilled poignancy in the lines "He liked to call me 'kid'/I liked it when he did," a dozen words that say more about friendship than most songs manage at all.

That short story writer's eye for detail and a unique angle on a familiar trope, which puts Erin Moran in the top drawer of lyricists with the likes of Dory Previn and Shawn Colvin, is nowhere better demonstrated than on Finest Actor, a killer portrait of a ladykiller, effortlessly conjuring up an inveterate player with a little bit of self-knowledge:

"He played to the camera instead of with me
Said “Honey, don’t pin your hopes on a ship lost at sea”
He could’ve been Burton, Harris, or Dean
They could’ve been moments, but they were just scenes"

To be honest I could easily have quoted the whole song.

Charity Shop Window is another song replete with top-notch writerly observations, always made in the service of conveying the story being told, with never the slightest hint of affectation or willed sentimentality. It's an extraordinarily difficult trick for a songwriter to pull off, and Moran does not falter once. This is exceptional stuff:

"Typewriters, guitars, autographs of the stars
Her heart's like some forgotten souvenir
Broken 45s, other people lives
Books half-read, love gone dead
A wedding dress promise yellowed with age
She just can’t turn the page"

Charity Shop Window also showcases a delectable guitar solo from multi-instrumentalist, co-producer and exemplary right hand man Daniel Tashian (of the Silver Seas); there's another, very different one on the swoonsome Pretenders tribute Someone's Going To Break Your Heart, the song that would have resulted had their version of Stop Your Sobbing made sweet music with Kid. Erin Moran is undoubtedly a stranger to bad taste, a felicitous trait that happily extends to her collaborators too.

Since I bought this album a week and a half ago, I've lost count of the number of times I've listened to it all the way through. There is nothing even remotely resembling a weak link, while it's hard to pick a standout track, such is the uniformly stratospheric standard. I will say that the song that I've been playing to friends as a taster is the penultimate cut, NY Man. It's exquisitely weightless and atmospheric, gently but urgently propelled by brushed snare drum and a highly melodic bassline, Eddy's honeyed voice like a lover's whispering poetry in your ear. In the pantheon of great songs about New York, here is one that can hold its head high, drenched in nostalgia and spirit of place:

"Oh New York man
I hear the subway see us walking hand in hand
On autumn afternoons
Smoking on fire escapes through summer moons"

The album closes as it began, in three quarter time, with Pale Blue Moon, a lovely duet with the estimable Tashian. It's very rare that having listened to an album all the way through, I go straight back to the beginning and listen again; I did it with Been Around, and I'm just going to have to come to terms with the fact that, yes, it looks as if I will end up loving it even more than the first album. There are worse dilemmas to face.