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Artist: Maron
Label: GRRRrecords
Time: 11 tracks/55:33
One year after the birth of her second child, Maron Graffon began work on her first musical offspring, UPTOWN. Still in her twenties, Maron has delivered (ok – the ‘birth’ metaphors are over!) a satisfying debut project that sounds refreshingly buoyant, and surprisingly wise for one so young. The eleven tracks flow easily, and in excellent sequence, taking the listener through a lyrical diary of one woman’s real-life questions, struggles, triumphs and joys. While still in high school, Maron (apparently, she’ll be known simply as ‘Maron,’ in her professional life) moved into the Jesus People USA (JPUSA) community in Chicago, where she not only found her musical calling, but apparently absorbed all of that good ol’ classic rock ambiance that saturates the place. The songs on Uptown are good, classic pop/rock tracks that sound airy and fresh, yet with a hint of the seventies about them.
All of the songs are written by Maron, except for lyrical help from Jedediah Graffon on “Zion.” The players are: Maron on vocals and piano, Khari Parker on drums, Mike Choby on bass, Mike Standal on various acoustic and electric guitars (and AdrenaLinn – your guess is as good as mine), Tom Vitacco on acoustic guitar, Chris Mosher on keyboards and occasional guitar and percussion, and Reuben Alvarez on percussion – and they do a wonderful job throughout the album. Uptown is basically free from synthetic sounds, samples, and synths, relying instead on the sound of real instruments, right down to the brief but tasteful use of a string trio.
The project starts off with the title track, which, ironically, is one of the weakest compositions of the eleven songs (I also still can’t figure out why it’s called “Uptown”), offering a fine, full, earthy sound, but becoming mostly a repetitive vamp for the bulk of the song – the rest of the album’s songs are more fully realized and show more melodic strength. The second track, “For Better or Worse,” is an instantly likeable song that successfully manages to straddle rock, pop, and country (while never abandoning the rock and roll aspect), and could become a hit in any number of radio formats: think, Shania Twain meets Sara Groves, backed up by a solid rock band. If ever there was a radio-ready track, “For Better or Worse” is it. The third track, “Directions,” is a solidly middle-tempo blues played powerfully by the band and featuring Maron’s soulful vocals flying through the heaviness of the track with introspective, poetic lyrics like, “I built a wall to block the sun / It gets too warm – sometimes the cold is much more fun / the grass is dead but so am I / No flowers growing where the sun can never shine.” The wonderful thing about this, and all of the songs on this album, is that you never get the sense that these are faceless session players that created tracks for someone to sing over, but that this is Maron and her band – a musical unit. Things lighten up a bit musically on “She Doesn’t Cause Your Problems,” which starts out sounding like something George Harrison started to write, then let John and Paul finish – the song is a pop masterpiece, with rich harmonies, Ringo-like drumming, and Mark Ditmars (?) joining Maron with a James Taylor-ish duet vocal. An interesting aspect of the album is that, up to this point, the project could cross-over to the mass market with ease, but the balance of the songs (and they are wonderful songs) leave the realm of relationship songs and become much more spiritually focused and explicitly Christian in nature: this is not a criticism, but an observation – the inequity and bias is on the part of the ‘secular’ media, and that’s to its’ shame. Maron is an artist that should be heard by a broad audience. For those of us who don’t discriminate against overtly Christian artists, there is the sheer power and joy of tracks like “My Glory,” with its fluid guitar solos, soaring vocals and full-out rock/praise approach.
It’s rare to hear such a fully-realized debut, but Maron has chosen the best of what we’ve come to know and love about the great Jesus Music of the sixties and seventies, as well as that of the modern pop world. This is an artist to watch – an excellent new voice, an introspective and sensitive lyricist, and one heck of a good song writer.
By Bert Saraco
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