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Album Description, Studio Photos, CD Jacket Design & Song Descriptions
In Call Out, Martha Groves Perry’s third release, her songwriting takes a decidedly bold turn, speaking clearly about hard truths with her characteristic insight and humor. Her lyrics are poetry, evoking strong visual and tactile imagery. Captivating melodic hooks, precise harmonies, and incisive commentary on herself and the world as she sees it combine with fat, intoxicating, badass Americana grooves created in partnership with producer Kenny Schick of Basement 3 Productions in Nashville. Flavors of PJ Harvey, Tom Waits, Tom Petty, and traditional Americana fuse in genre-bending performances, completed by Perry’s expansive and compelling vocal palette that has been compared to Natalie Merchant. Call Out pulls no punches, even in its softer moments, and is an important offering among the music of 2023.
This album is a study in high contrast – dark and light, acceptance and refusal, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, forgiveness and rotting antipathy, rage and joy, acquiescence and calling out. Perry’s response is to speak truth as she understands it, and to acknowledge and affirm the contradictions and their richness. A hallmark of Perry’s songwriting is that even as she weighs in on deep and hard topics, the melody and groove stay magnetic, allowing the listener to experience the satisfying disquiet without spinning out. Perry’s songs communicate the tension between being stuck while freefalling and being drowned in noise while speaking as powerfully as she ever has.
Call Out affirms that the darks are dark, and the light is so very light, but insists that we not make everything gray to make it more comfortable, or make things gray when they are black, or call things gray that are another color altogether. This album gives off heat while churning like an underground river, opening the surface of our experience like a sinkhole to reveal truth.
Studio Photos
TONE FREQ STUDIOS, SAN JOSE CA
May 27, 2022 – Photos by Steven Glaze
May 25, 2022 – Photos by Barbara Cromarty
March 9 & 11, 2022 – Photos by Kenny Schick
CD Jacket Design
Exceptional photography makes the look of Martha’s 3rd release Call Out … appear quite noirish & compelling.
John Apice, Americana Highways
Album Cover
Opening the jacket
Opening the jacket again
Back cover
Track Descriptions
1. Anyway
The heady, atmospheric groove of Anyway captures the tension between being reminded of who I once was and affirming who I am now. The song is about acknowledging mistakes in the past while moving on and staying centered, even in the midst of memories that others might use to provoke regret. It’s a reminder that no one can make you feel bad unless you let them, and that entertaining might-have-beens is rarely worthwhile.
2. You Might
The grinding, heated tone of You Might perfectly reflects how it felt from May 2020 to May 2021 in the wake of events taking place worldwide and in my own neighborhood in San Francisco. Anxiety and anger gave way to a fierce drive to speak truth in the face of lies. I was scared to take risks in my songwriting until this song, but those 12 months changed me and changed my songwriting. Those who hear me play You Might often say that this song helps them to process the difficulty of that time; I can ask for little more than that as a songwriter.
3. Blessed Avalanche
The jagged, crunchy, southern rock groove in Blessed Avalanche speaks eloquently about not carrying sh*t around and trying to be strong when you really need to put stuff down. Having worked in restaurants, I know how oddly satisfying the sound of breaking dishes can be, and it seemed an apt and amusing metaphor for what happens when it all gets to be a bit too much and then comes crashing down. This song’s groove reflects one direction my music is going: involving at least one electric guitar and a good overdrive pedal.
4. The Dare
The Dare is a satisfying fast ball, right down the middle. The upbeat, power pop groove fully embraces this joyful, laughing look at my process of overcoming crippling self-doubt. It is intensely singable, danceable, and just plain fun. This song is an exuberant shout of affirmation that I’m on the right track, despite myself.
Enjoy.
5. Let the Wind Come
Let the Wind Come has an organic, rootsy Americana vibe reminiscent of a Nashville string band but with a low-key electronic, contemporary flavor. With a strong nod to my roots in Indiana and Kentucky, this song reflects my deep love for the music of the Smoky Mountains even as the fat groove and the cool swagger in the guitar and vocals mark it as a hybrid acoustic offering. The lyrics reveal a strong wish fulfillment streak in my dream life, apparently including granting myself an apology that will almost certainly never materialize in my lifetime.
6. Feel Something
The indie rock flavor of Feel Something, reminiscent of Neko Case and The Smiths, features an intense, sexy, urban melody and groove. This song is a good example of how my lyrics and the way I express them sometimes contrast, often with an amused side eye at myself. The dazed, anxious numbness of the last few years is the subject, and the song’s stark, stripped down quality gestures towards the monotonous isolation of that time. The song explores the contradiction between careening through lots of big, scary feelings while seeming to feel nothing at all.
7. Purely Who You Are
With a gentle Tom Waits vibe in the electric guitar coupled with an unusual melody, Purely Who You Are sprang from an evening with my young daughter that began with her giving me ballet lessons then devolved into a crazy dance party. That night, I dreamed the melody, and it captures her beautifully: playful, smart, complicated, unusual, and open. Featuring insanely tight harmonies and an intriguing counterpoint between the guitar and the vocals, this track has everything I love: a substantive subject, unusual percussion, distinctive sounds (spot the music box), and a bit of moxie.
8. The Talk
Written several years ago about a disturbing moment in an unhealthy relationship, The Talk pulses with a dark intensity that resonates powerfully with my fractured mindset in times of trouble. Producer Kenny Schick combined huge, warped percussion with raw, brutalized treatments, giving this song a decidedly noir atmosphere. The result is a track that reflects the contradiction between things clicking into place while falling apart, dissociating while assimilating, and shattering while growing stronger. I chose to include this song on the album because the last chorus, which features me screaming, sounded like the inside of my head at the time we were working on it.
9. Four Leaf Clover
Four Leaf Clover features a compelling Celtic shuffle groove and tells the story of a complex relationship between me and my father over four leaf clovers. The unusual arc of the verse melody provides the harmonic tension and complexity to carry the contradictory emotions in the song – lightness and heaviness, snarkiness and longing – as does the alternation between swing and straight rhythms. The resulting slight world music vibe gives the song a cinematic folk noir vibe that elevates the song beyond its immediate story and into the realm of archetype.
10. Dumping My Delusion
With a vibe reminiscent of PJ Harvey and Morphine, Dumping My Delusion tells the story of a weird moment of clarity, standing in my bedroom looking out the window, when I realized that it was senseless for me to carry around a years-old hurt that those who inflicted it were not even thinking about anymore. The song has a grinding, noshing, releasing mood, kind of like pulling off the top of your head, reaching in, rummaging that stuff together, then chucking it as hard and as far away as you can. My producer, Kenny Schick, nailed the feeling, cementing a decided, new direction in my music that involves a lot of electric guitar overdrive.
11. McKiely’s Song
McKiely – for whom this song is named – is a little girl in Kentucky who asked me through a mutual friend in the fall of 2020 to write a song “about how terrible Covid is.” The question forced me to refocus my lens from reactionary fear and anger to a longer view that included confidence that this time would pass, which I was not feeling at the time. The result is a plain-speaking, gentle, and simple but profound message that fills the request – to articulate the horrible – while providing what I wish every child can take away from the experience: a kernel of hope. The syncopated percussion and guitar work have a world music vibe reminiscent of Paul Simon’s Graceland, and the beautiful choral bridge includes a lovely vocal track from McKiely herself as well as 56 others, recorded remotely and gathered from each person in true pandemic style.
12. Little Life
The richly textured, Celtic rock vibe of Little Life is complemented by a folk noir percussion style that gives it a meditative quality even as the groove pulses forward with energy. The track features my Travis picking acoustic guitar as well as a tasty interplay between my cello and my producer’s electric guitar, with flavors redolent of Dire Straits and Peter Gabriel. The result is a dreamy drop into that liminal space where maybe you can breathe underwater or fly just by thinking about it. I tend to write about the small stuff, and this song is a both an intimate sigh and a vulnerable affirmation that every life holds sufficient material for making art.
Martha Groves Perry 