Music should always be about more than mere entertainment. I mean, it is fine if that is all you want it to be, but given a platform where you have a chance to say something meaningful and do so to a lot of people, not to do so is, surely, a missed opportunity. See Her is anything but a missed opportunity. It is the sound of someone revealing very deep parts of themselves, an artist laying themselves bare, unflinchingly vulnerable, yet the themes found running through these songs are as relatable as they are revealing, if not always directly, then certainly in terms of expressing aspects of what it means to be a human dealing with the challenges of modern society.
Having realized, only weeks before her wedding, that she was trans, Danni Hoshino came out, and her old life unraveled in a mixture of liberty and challenge, beauty and pain. But in that maelstrom of conflict and change, she found her true voice. See Her is the story of that new voice and that new life.
The title track is a love letter to her true self and a reminder of how she found the bravery to be honest with the world and, in doing so, where she fitted into it. But as the introductory spoken word fades away, a fragmented country chord progression and serene guitar lines coalesce into a heartfelt plea, you realize that, while this is a personal document, it is also relatable to anyone who feels they are not showing the world who they really are.
“Alright” is a bitter suite, ballad, a duet with Lotz, and reminds us that as we move through life, things change and the repercussions of those changes might liberate you from the bad, but can also bring the demise of something good, and often there is no one to blame, that it is just life doing what life does.
Her spacious cover of the Billy Joel classic, “Vienna,” fits in perfectly with the rest of the album and is one of the best renditions I have heard in a long time, it is in the space between the notes and chords that the true emotions and atmospheres are found lingering.
At its heart, this is a country album, but it is modern, forward-thinking, it moves with the times, and it tackles subjects that traditional country rarely goes near. So, as much as this is a gloriously intimate, personal diary entry of a literally life-changing time in Light Bird’s life, it is also a wonderful and gigantic leap forward for what that genre can be as we head into a very different future from the one the genre grew up in.
Change, on all levels, is liberating.
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