The Wildwoods
Dear Meadowlark
Bruce Springsteen’s starkly rendered Nebraska painted a pretty bleak and desolate picture of the “Cornhusker State,” with its crushing loneliness and desperation, not to mention the violence and criminality. The Wildwoods offer a different perspective with the assured and unabashedly earnest Dear Meadowlark, the fourth LP from the homey Americana-folk trio, Nebraska residents who seem remarkably well-adjusted and exude pastoral melodic charm.
Immediately, the pristine and alluring vocal harmonies of husband-and-wife team Noah and Chloe Gose arrive on the front stoop of Dear Meadowlark, weaving an arresting a cappella reading of “Meadowlark” as a gentle greeting. Making themselves comfortable in environs as cozy as an old farmhouse, they grapple with the vagaries of transitioning to adulthood, seek inner peace, and draw heartfelt sketches of quaint, small-town living that capture the essence of bucolic contentment and Midwestern simplicity, richly detailed in the affecting and slightly twangy “I Will Follow You to Willow” – lush and flowing, steel guitar flourishes and all – and the wheeling, grassy “Sweet Niobrara.”
As if designed and decorated by Alison Krauss and Union Station, the guileless, if often wistful, Dear Meadowlark works itself into a light and tasteful tangle of acoustic and electric guitar, violin and cello, upright bass and organ, all rolling along over folk-pop terrain and occasionally going off on lithe, breezy bluegrass runs, like that threading through “Dear Stranger.” There’s also a satisfying bounce to “Under the Rug” that is welcome, as the sumptuously catchy “I’m in Sandusky” easily tosses languid hooks around like candy from a float in a homecoming parade. The whole community would turn out for it, as they should for Dear Meadowlark and The Wildwoods, whose sophisticated strings perform a lovely, uplifting barn raising in “Poster Child.”
Welcome to Nebraska, where beautiful records like Dear Meadowlark are made, or at least conceived.
