Tai Shan - Wildflower Moon (self-released)

Like all great music, Tai Shan’s song-crafting is about much more than just the matching of sounds and styles into new sonic shapes. True, she has managed to weave a signature sound that relies on folk and jazz, Americana, and even indie-pop, and so creating a blend of music that echoes with authenticity and also infectiousness, which is deftly woven but easily accessed. However, it is the additional, less tangible qualities that bring the music to life.

It is the stuff of life – motherhood, travel, personal reflection, wanderlust, and the comfort of family – that is the musical glue that holds the nuanced notes and poetic lyrics together. And the result of all these factors is a wonderfully ironic contradiction – never has an album made you simultaneously want to hold your family close and head off down the highway in search of adventure.

“Road Back To Me” is a glorious slice of roots-pop, so much so that you can imagine both Taylor Swift and The Dixie Chicks fighting dirty to get their hands on it. And if “My Station” is one of those perfect genre-defying ballads, songs like “Jump On In” are groovesome, blues-rock brilliance.

But it is an album that leans more towards nuance than noise, delicacy than drive, as the ambient gorgeousness and pathos of “How It Flew (The Kite Song)” and the warm soul-jazz of “Lullaby Rendezvous” perfectly demonstrate.

Sitting somewhere between Nora Jones later country excursions and Billie Holiday’s finesse, Wildflower Moon is that rare thing, a modern album that can hold its own against the classics of the past.

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