Album Review: I Thought of You by Julie Doiron

Anyone familiar with Julie Doiron's work ethic knows that, just because she hasn't put out a proper album in a moon's age, doesn't mean she hasn't been busy. Since her last full-length, 2012's So Many Days, the Moncton singer/songwriter founded a couple of supergroups, recorded another album with Mount Eerie, and re-recorded some of her material in Spanish. Maybe this is why her ninth solo LP, I Thought of You, finds the three-decade vet sounding wonderfully revitalized and well-worn. Compiled from songs Doiron wrote across the last decade (including several previously released numbers), these 13 songs meld several eras throughout her career, both musically and emotionally.

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A few years ago, when asked to describe her music in one word, Julie Doiron responded, "Life-like." It's a perfect choice for a few reasons. Since her 1997 solo debut, the Canadian songwriter has favored sparse settings, minimal overdubs, and no effects on her voice--an atmosphere that conjures the image of a lone figure trudging through snow, cutting the quiet in a calm, dry voice. But Doiron said "life-like" and not just "life," because her music has an element of surreality: The lyrics--pared-down stories full of I's and you's that read more like stage directions than scenes--resemble life in the way a sketch or an outline does, asking to be overlaid with our own imagination to see the full picture.

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Photo by Matt Williams I Thought Of You by Julie Doiron "Yes I was living in this darkness, it called me out by name, and it told me all of the things I wanted it to say," croons Julie Doiron in "Darkness to Light" from her first album since 2012's So Many Days. The song is a gentle jangle, faintly countrified in the arcs of pedal steel that Michael Feuerstack, her collaborator in Snailhouse, vaults across the sound. Doiron's voice flutters, as always, with a plain-spoken, weathered sweetness, fraying a little at the corners.

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