Amy Helm | Silver City
(Sun Record Company)Amy Helm's fourth solo album is her most intimate and personal to date, as well as being a long-overdue showcase for her dynamic, soulful vocals. Much ink has been spilled about Helm's father's influence on her, but on Silver City one can especially hear the influence of her mother, the unheralded 1970s folk-pop singer-songwriter and Woodstock native Libby Titus. That being said, references to "rock of ages" and "my father's voice" remind one of her lineage as the daughter of the late, great drummer-singer Levon Helm of The Band. (The effort was recorded at the Woodstock studio bearing his name.) Helm views the 10 songs she wrote or cowrote here as letters to real and imagined women—an abused teen mother (based on the plight of her great-grandmother), a struggling single parent, a woman managing post-divorce grief. Producer Josh Kaufman sets these "letter-songs" in sparse, delicate arrangements that support Helm's dazzling, sinuous vocals.
