Album Review: Andy by Romi Wrights
Romi Wrights writes her protest song in the same language as her breakup songs. Andy is a record about eviction in every sense.
There are two ways to write about someone who betrayed you. There’s the way you can write what it did to you, or there’s the way you can write what you found when you looked. On her debut, Andy, Te Whanganui-a-Tara singer-songwriter Romi Wrights formulates almost everything here to somebody close enough to answer. Produced by Kenny Sterling, she has the more interesting hand at the second option, the one that gets more specific the closer it comes to things like phones and doors and chairs around a table.
The watching is painful for her. The man’s out goofing off with the guys and gone for a bit, and when she questions him about something that doesn’t quite check out, he tells her she feels bad because of herself, and so she peeks at the phone while he naps and laments that she shouldn’t have. On “Leaving,” the subsequent verse is about someone else, really, telling whoever will listen that she already told her friends and family he was everything to her, that this has to be the fifth time, that she looks foolish, and then she turns to him and says “I know I wasn’t perfect, baby, but I was working on it while you were working on her.” She takes responsibility for her share of the problems in the relationship in the same breath that she accuses him of.
Her questions go unanswered on “Search to Find (The Truth),” where the sky falls during a walk in the park and whoever is with her says that’s fine, and the birds have left with their song, and she wants to know why he is so good at being right about everything. Flutes are circling the piano while she asks after the birds; “Capsized” has a lone image running through it of a ship she has pried the walls out of and opened up to the water and the cold, and the line that gets the most mileage is a geometrical statement: “The shoreline’s getting too small between you and I.” “Bring It Back” covers similar emotional territory from a closer vantage point, a woman begging the feeling to return but finding herself in his arms anyway, unable to cut the threads that bind her to him, even as she says they are too tightly woven.
She watches something in the water from behind the tinted glass on “Storm Has Passed,” worries about being able to control it, asks to be held, and by the chorus the storm has passed, and she announces that she wants him to come and get his love from her. “Sunshine In My Eyes” asks two questions of him, whether it is her time he needs or all her love, but she can’t get past telling him that this love of his is one she could get used to and couldn’t be replaced. Both songs want the feeling but not the furnishings.
Furnishings are what she gets in “For You,” a song to someone who cannot answer, that she feels through the sunshine, hears in her thoughts, knows is in His arms, sees as an angel sent from heaven, those being the phrases everyone uses. The one that is uniquely hers is the chair; she keeps a seat at the table, which is a thing she has to do, with a chair and a table, real objects that have been placed around a room. “Shine Your Light” looks elsewhere, at someone who holds the keys and the pieces to a puzzle that still gets paused, and most of the song is a litany of what that sort of person is good for, encouragement knocking on the door and so forth. There’s just one blemish in the song when he talks about how all you’ve been through has painted your soul red.
One song on this album is not directed to a significant other and seems to take its motifs and ideas from the rest of the material. “Quick to Forget” recounts seeing one’s home burnt down, the loss of any chance at personal power, having all locks changed, and being run out of one’s own house, demanding that all those responsible go ahead, and noting that the person has been “so good at that.” A charge was applied to another, supposedly significant other, for not returning phone messages. Then the hook picks up momentum towards loftier statements about the elevation of mankind and more generalized proclamations than are found in the verses.
In a spot of pristine intention, “Without You” has Wright moving on from the throes of breakup despair to the titular declaration of the song proper; this life requires a diamond ring, this one seems to say. She isn’t about to propose as such, but sizing up her net worth, in a sense determining her self-worth, but it comes in direct response to the verses beforehand. It’s her lover’s overconsumption of her love and theft of her time that come into play, along with a general sense of her finally waking up to the reality of who the person she loved was. The real-life equivalent is the song “Special,” which would be a room filled with sunshine from the curtains, colors shifting on someone’s skin, two hands clasped together. All of this before she completely abandons that idea for telling him that it makes her feel special and that she wants him to know it’s reciprocal.
On “Rain or Shine,” the stock material comes early: eyes that stop time, a moon that gets placed in orbit around a heart, hours slipping by whenever he calls. She sings all that over horns and a generally upbeat rhythm section. The second verse tightens and improves on the first, her standing at her door with it opened and arms out in any kind of weather. She tells him that good things take time, and that’s why she’ll wait, and she gets to the point of saying, “I think I love you,” before circling back to update him that she does. All the things that are worth saving in this song are in that second verse, standing in a doorway and letting the weather in.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Capsized,” “Leaving,” “Without You”