Album Review: Tim O’Brien and Jan Fabricius, ‘Paper Flowers’
Tim O’Brien and Jan Fabricius have been writing songs and playing and singing together since 2013. While many of the songs on Paper Flowers reveal chapters of their story together, the songs showcase the duo’s musical inventiveness and the ease with which they move from a folk ballad to a gospel-inflected song to a jazz stroll. O’Brien and Fabricius wrote twelve of the fifteen songs on the new album with Tom Paxton.
Fabricius’s ringing mandolin picking opens “Atchison,” an up-tempo bluegrass rambler that combines swaying jazz rhythms with Jimmy Buffett-like balladry and a few measures of old-time yodeling. Django Reinhardt-like strumming opens the sauntering gypsy-jazz number “Fat Pile of Puppies.” The darker minor chord verses give way to a bright major chord refrain, mimicking the emotional whiplash of being afraid of falling in love to diving deeply into love’s embrace. A spare musical setting flows below Fabricius’s crystalline vocals on “Hungry Hearts,” a tender folk ballad. When O’Brien’s baritone vocals join in harmony, the song’s delicate tendrils of sound convey the yearning and loneliness at the heart of a relationship marked by distance and necessary separation. The jaunty title track, with its sonic echoes of Rick Nelson’s “Garden Party,” offers a glimpse of Fabricius’s and O’Brien’s own story, while the rollicking “Blacktop Rag Mop” burns down the roadhouse, opening with Jerry Lee Lewis-like piano trills and rocketing straight-ahead the rockabilly road. Fabricius and her backup group, The Karens (Phoebe Hunt, Odessa Settles, Bonnie Sims, Melody Walker), combine a little Grace Slick with a little Lesley Gore and little of the Roches on the hilarious girls-out-to-party song “Down to Burn.” Stately piano chords blend with soaring B3 strains, and the percussion produces a hymn-like cadence on the towering “Back to Eden.” “This Gal of Mine” flows along pattering guitar rhythms, sprightly bowed fiddles, cascading piano, and vamping vocals to produce a cross between an East St. Louis toodle-loo and a New Orleans medicine show sashay. The spare musical setting of “Covenant,” a song about the Covenant school shooting in Nashville, and the purity of the vocals evoke the ache of loss. “Here with Me,” an ode to the power of love and togetherness, closes the album.
While Paper Fowers has been too long in arriving, it’s well worth the wait. We can only hope that we won’t have to wait so long for the next Jan Fabricius and Tim O’Brien album, for every song on this one shines brightly and plumbs the depths of human emotion.
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Paper Flowers is available HERE.
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