Review: Phoebe Hunt Goes It Alone on 'Nothing Else Matters'
The pandemic made a lot of musicians rethink how they create music. Isolated from bandmates and often studios, you began to see a number of stripped down acoustic albums and shows, often featuring just the artist and a guitar. But few of these stripped down albums are as spare as Nothing Else Matters, the new album from Phoebe Hunt.
Isolated from the rest of her band The Gatherers, her in Nashville and them in Brooklyn, Hunt flipped through her notebook of songs and began to re-arrange them for just her fiddle and voice. To assist, Hunt tapped friends and fellow songwriters Maya DeVitry, Jillette Johnson, and Dustin Welch, as well as producer Lawson White in the writing process. The result is an album that doesn't just cope with the necessities of solo recording but leans fully into it to punctuate the themes of the album.
On the coming of age title track, co-written by DeVitry, Hunt kicks things off with a fiddle riff that almost feels like an upbeat dance number, singing “we were one long night / we were one sweet morning / We were all time.” As the narrator ages, she copes with the loneliness and grief that everyone feels in adulthood before reminding herself of that immortal youngster she once was, “I don't need the world to hear me / to know that I'm singing / I'm singing / Nothing else matters.” It's as succinct a defiance of pandemic depression as I've heard on a pandemic album.
On “Galloping,” Hunt grasps with even bigger existential issues, equating them to riding an out of control horse. “Galloping the whole way home / if I let him / who is in control? / rider or beast?” It's musically and lyrically the album's strongest track, and one that sticks with you long after the album ends. “Are you running so fast that you're flying away? / Have you found eternal freedom / in the setting of the dawn of the day?”
Throughout Nothing Else Matters, Hunt shows off the diversity of the fiddle, plucking, strumming, and bowing to fit the needs of the song. She also shows off the diversity of her own voice, unable to hide behind harmony vocals. It's a raw album with some raw themes to dish out, and one that Hunt serves up to great effect. If you like your music lo-fi and DIY, this is the album for you.