The Musician (Grizelda)

If The Musician were a movie, its climactic moment would be when the main character, the musician, is about to kill Mr. Recordman. "It started with those demo tapes she sent him, and all those messages she left him..." Before she blows him to bits, though, she wants to know if he remembers her. At this point, the musician's face would fill the screen. "No?" she would sing, with a late- career-Billie Holiday-like catching of her breath.
There is simply no getting through to Mr. Recordman (the man, the idea, the corporate conglomerate). What's a musician to do? Start her own record company, naturally. Then hole up in her Santa Barbara home/studio and write cathartic, inspiring, lovely-to-listen-to songs about herself: her childhood, her sucky day job, her lover, her doing just fine, thank you, without a major label. She shouldn't let anyone hear the songs until The Musician is done, so as not to be "burdened or distracted by people's opinions."

The Musician is Jennifer Terran's third release on her homegrown Grizelda Records, and all the wit and profundity that spiced up the first two -- clevernesses such as making a song out of the thank yous listed on the CD jacket -- add more than just personal flavor this time around. Between songs about the musician (Terran sometimes employs an alter ego, but a press release confesses the album "is primarily a deeply personal and honest look at Terran") we get the musician just being herself: introducing the listener to her recording equipment, or declaring an in-between zone the listener can avoid by setting his CD player to random. The effect is astonishingly cohesive. Terran has a voice like a siren (the mythical creature), a playful, inventive, just-right approach to piano, and a pitch-perfect ear for the winds and strings backing her up. Riffing on three words, she can say more about human weakness than all America during a Clinton scandal. Her lyric-driven melodies don't offer much in the way of verse, chorus and bridge -- what Mr. Recordman sought, perhaps -- but they'll nonetheless implant themselves in the replay part of your brain, and leave you in no rush to overwrite them.