Continuing to build an impressive catalogue of great songs is Macartney Reinhardt with her latest "Bones". She has yet to misplace a step in her recording career, each song showing her gaining further musical, lyrical or studio skills as she goes.
"Bones" starts in a Brandy Clark fashion, with a an acoustic guitar that all but beckons the listener to cup their ear and find out whatever it is Macartney wishes to lay on us . It's almost a Nashville rite of passage to write a "Small Town" song and if you are going to do it you may as well do it well and Macartney is able to generate that claustrophobic feeling of everyone knowing your business with just a few well chosen words.
"Grandma owned a flower shop in a one stop, map dot town
Grandpa was an auctioneer, had the fastest voice around
There's a college down the road with my last name on the side
If there's one thing I've learned it's there's some lessons you can't buy"
There's a lot to unpack even from that deceptively simple opening verse. The size of the town is established with a four word hardly flattering description "one stop map dot", each syllable driving the point home rhythmically and the fact that her family roots go deep, show the sort of hold a small town can have. The line about the college was so inviting that we checked it out and there is indeed a Reinhardt University in Georgia and the final line maybe explains why Macartney is now to be found in Nashville.
The chorus follows up on that indelible link that remains no matter how much things may change.
"You can drive away but you can't drive out
You can change the name, change the paint but my roots own this ground
You can fade away - come back a ghost
Nobody knows your business till you're finished
And this town holds you Bones"
As the second verse starts a mandolin becomes more audible and this is where the song veers off in a totally different direction sound wise with the arrival of some synth sounding strings that add a new dimension to proceedings altogether.
"I found myself a guy in a John Deere coloured house
Those walls would hold, the stories told, that we'll keep passing down
Down down down down down"
Top marks for using John Deere to describe the house, which only adds to Macartney's credentials as if she needed any more kudos. The second chorus is bolder and braver in sound, the keyboard strings are powerfully prominent and just as it seems to be drawing to a close, Macartney uses the title of the song "Bones" to dive off into space with a massive soaring extended note.
The overall soundscape then becomes epic, cinematic, as if it should accompany an old time big screen western.
A return for a third chorus sees the sound substantially subside for the opening two lines allowing Macartney to be at the forefront before the band kick back in once more.
Unleashing some more soaring vocals, just as you think "Bones" will fade away, a final little section comes as a haunting postscript, with a banjo and church bell for additional atmospherics, it is a final indication of the hold the town retains.
"There's a tiny little graveyard, right next to the church
Seven generations, six feet in the dirt"
It all goes to make a thrilling two and a half minute listen