Rebecca Martin Makes Her Solo Stand – Jazz Times

The singer-songwriter, with just voice and guitar, presents a new and revelatory song cycle.

“Following the thread” is the phrase singer-songwriter Rebecca Martin uses to characterize her free-minded approach to composition. And it’s the method by which she developed the 13 songs on SHE (Sunnyside), her first solo album. Accompanied by her own guitar, Martin unfurls a cycle of tunes marked by a bracing, bittersweet intimacy, offering profound insights into loneliness, inchoate desire and hard-won perseverance.

“It didn’t occur to me earlier on to do a solo recording,” says Martin, who first emerged in the mid-1990s as the musical partner, with Jesse Harris, in the indie pop-jazz band Once Blue. Later collaborations with Guillermo Klein and Paul Motian had a major impact on Martin’s songwriting and informed SHE as well.”