Edie Brickell
Picture Perfect Morning

THE REVIEW

Edie Brickell is not a shooting star.

Texan, born in '66, she became famous in 1988 thanks to an intimate PopFolk album: “Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars,” which included songs like “What I Am” and “Circle”, followed by the much underrated “Ghost of a Dog” in '90.

These two albums were released under the name “Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians,” thus also remembering the band that accompanied her in those years; this association disappeared for quite some time, due to the events I will soon recount, to return only in 2006 with the album “Stranger Things,” leaving Edie to a rather peculiar solo career.

In the early '90s, fate arranged the meeting between the frog Edie and the Prince of American Folk, Paul Simon: the result was a Marriage (I think still ongoing), three children, two solo albums (nine years apart... Ah, the family!), and thousands of broken hearts, including mine...

If you allow me at this point, speaking of broken hearts, I want to make a small personal digression: exploring my memories and seeking the reasons for various changes in tastes and/or opinions that occurred in my life, the facts present me with evidence: “Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars” was the first album not of purely Rock origin to enter my life, as well as the first by a Female Singer-Songwriter (I was 14 years old), and considering the year (at that time the most frequently listened to album was “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” by Maiden, to understand) I can, quite calmly, attribute it the role of a watershed between the genres that still most meet my tastes today, in short, Edie was for me what Aristotle was first for Hellenism and later for Christianity (and sorry for the immodesty of the comparison).

Returning to the topic of the review, I have already mentioned the two solo albums released after the marriage to Simon: the first, “Picture Perfect Morning” from '94, the second “Volcano” from 2003, both deserving of attention and both not reviewed on DeB, I will talk about the first:

“Picture Perfect Morning” is, of course, produced by Paul Simon, chronologically arriving a good 5 years after Edie's last release, and these two things can be perceived immediately upon first listen: indeed, if Brickell's early works were pervaded by adolescent innocence, here we are presented with an album created by a person who has become an adult, first a wife and then also a mother, with all the merits but also the flaws that this entails.

From a sonic point of view, the domain remains Folk but without, or almost, all the Pop influences of the past, and if some deviation is present, this leads to a mature Acoustic Rock, sober and devoid of frills.

But what is most surprising is the emotional environment: despite the key reading still to be found in the intimate sphere, Edie completely abandons the existential questions she had accustomed fans to focus more on stories of everyday life, without renouncing the dreamlike embellishments in the lyrics, “her trademarks.”

That said, however, one cannot avoid noticing the work's flaws, which are to be found in the attempt to adapt to the canons of classical Folk songwriting, losing part of the freshness present in the two albums under the “New Bohemians” brand, a flaw ultimately adeptly healed by Paul Simon's “craft” both at production and as a session musician, because from a technical point of view, here we are in front of an almost impeccable work, performed and played so professionally as to run the risk of seeming too well packaged: this feeling vanishes if one gives the time for this album to mature inside us, maturing through clear and honest songs like “Tomorrow Comes,” “When the Light Goes Down,” “Olivia,” and “In the Bath.”

To listen to, as the title suggests, early in the morning among a croissant, a cappuccino, and the first rays of sun...

...dawning.

Mo.