Lisa Mills is getting great reviews for IM CHANGING. She has made a special album that deserves the attention. It should be clear by now that I’m Changing is a rare breed, a roots torch album of sweep and depth comparable to classic pop counterparts such as Sinatra’s devastating Gordon Jenkins-arranged No One Cares. Call it sacrilege, but to these ears Lisa Mills’s original songs can stand toe-to-toe with the powerful tunes by the likes of Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin and others on Sinatra’s masterpiece. Do an A/B and tell me “I’m Changing” and “Better Than This” are tepid compared to “When No One Cares” and “Why Try to Change Me Now?” To paraphrase Ralph J. Gleason: The Mills style is a natural one. You cannot contrive something as real as that. She sings as if she were telling you a story and not as though the words were merely pegs on which to hang notes. When she sings a lyric it sounds just as you would like it to sound if you could sing it yourself. It sounds natural and it sounds logical, so logical and inevitable that you wonder if there is any other way to sing it. …Those bitter-sweet, late night, sad songs of days that used to require an interpreter who can be sad without being maudlin, who can, in short, be woman enough to cry a little and with the tears gain dignity. More than being one of the finest albums of 2014, I’m Changing is Lisa Mills’s breaking away moment, marking the maturing of an artist in complete command of her gifts, leaving all contemporary pretenders to the throne in the dust, and emerging fully triumphant—a singer and songwriter of the first rank, uncompromising in the vision and concept of her art. Fly on little wing. You are free.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 14:00:01 +0000
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