It's funny that after sort-of shitting on James Taylor for his blandness that I'm going to express admiration for Rosie Thomas, a singer-songwriter that's put out half a dozen or so albums that are probably even less rock and roll than Taylor, but so be it: I contain multitudes.
Rosie Thomas was a little bit of a big deal at one time: she had a couple of albums on Sub Pop in the earliest part of the century, pretty, unassuming little records whose titles and songs--When We Were Small; "2 Dollar Shoes"; "Paper Doll"; "Kite Song"--give you a good idea of what the music itself sounds like: delicate, lacy songs about small moments that mostly get by on the strength of Thomas's lilting falsetto. It feels like this kind of semi-lo-fi folk was very much in vogue at the time: Damien Jurado--more on him later--to cite just one example, made at least two terrific albums, 2000's Ghost of David (which features the Thomas-assisted "Parking Lot") and 2006's And Now That I'm In Your Shadow, in this same vein.
While I've been aware of Rosie Thomas for as long as she's been releasing music, I never listened to her work, but I recently bought her 2007 album These Friends of Mine, and I can say without a doubt if I'd known of her in the prime of my Acoustic Indie Songwriter Phase she would have been in heavy rotation. I've long since moved away from a lot of that stuff, which means my listening to These Friends of Mine is often less about my actually listening to the music and more about looking back at the younger version of myself who listened to endless hours of this kind of material.
Thomas was never much of a critical favorite, and there's good reason for that: her music is uniformly pleasant, but for the most part it lacks whatever It factor that elevates music---or any kind of art for that matter--into that higher realm. These Friends of Mine is ten tracks, but in only a very few instances does it punch through its basic niceness, most spectacularly on the gorgeous "Much Farther To Go", which is shot-through with the kind of aching sadness that seems so particular to being 22 years old, what I remember Dwight Yoakam once describing as "the kind of melancholy that only comes from youthful innocence." These moments are too few and far between on These Friends of Mine.
Sufjan Stevens is credited as co-producer here, and he appears throughout, adding vocals and instrumentation. It's kind of strange listening to the album and remembering how Stevens himself once played in this modest kind of sandbox before becoming such a huge figure in the indie rock world with his more blown-up, grandiose arrangements: he and Thomas duet on a cover of REM's "The One I Love" that easily could have appeared on Seven Swans, his own Pretty Folk Album, released two years previously.
The title song is something of a coup: an ode to friendship and the power of music, it manages to bring together a murderers' row of Christian indie-folk songwriters--Sufjan Stevens, Damien Jurado, Denison Witmer, David Bazan, and Jeremy Enigk--to provide a backing choir. The song is so openhearted and earnest that to bother complaining about the relative slightness of the rest of the material seems churlish.
