music
Greta Gaines
Let the Lighthouse Shine
by Holly Gleason | photography by Anthony Scarlati
“I figured this is my last full-length album, so I’m gonna architect“I finally stopped giving a shit,” Greta Gaines admits.
it carefully, making it what I want. I kept all the tracks live: live vocals, Eric [Fritsch] played drums . . . and we built out from there, but it was exactly what I wanted, not what the momentum created.”
What the world-champion extreme snowboarder/fly fisherwoman wanted was an album that was—like everything about her world— immediate, evocative, and ultimately not what you’d expect. Lighthouse & the Impossible Love delivers: soundscapes set the stage for Gaines’ voice to drift, drop, and ignite as necessary on tracks where atmospherics dominate. A tumbledown bass and a wash of buzz set her My Favorite Mistakeera, Sheryl Crow-evoking reflection on seeking a beacon title track in a searing juxtaposition of the feminine rising from the cacophony around her. If Whiskey Thoughts, her last album, was a swinging for the Americana/Adult Alternative bleachers project, Lighthouse is more intimate, more personal, and more . . . essential.
“This is me proving something to myself,” says the woman who’s hosted television shows for MTV, Oprah’s OWN Network, and ESPN-2. “Whiskey Thoughts was great, but I was trying to fit into other people’s definitions . . . This time, the songs came, and everything was incredibly fresh, and we’d track in the moment. “It took five years, but I knew this was the last full-length CD I was going to make. I wanted everything, right down to the mix, to be exactly the way I heard it, exactly what the songs should have. “And I figured if I did it right, I’d not need to make another one. I can make singles, put out tracks and compilations . . . but this would be the last full album.” Lighthouse weighs the reality of a girl no longer young, a woman coming into her own and realizing that every choice requires letting go of something else. Not merely a quest to be happy where you are, it is honest and transparent about the conflicts and realms of the human psyche.
66 | June 2O13 NashvilleArts.com