Features the NPR Song OF The Day "Hard Times."
Rebecca Pronsky may be Brooklyn-based, but the dark, twangy folk she creates on her Nine Mile sophomore disc Viewfinder sounds more at home in the deep woods and green pastures of Parsonsfield, ME where it was recorded.
Pronsky spent two weeks holed up with her band at Great North Sound Society with engineer Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter, John Prine, Langhorne Slim), creating the sweeping soundscapes that dominate Viewfinder. And aside from the twangy "Mercury News" (penned by friend Lucy Wainwright Roche) and the bouncy "Give Up Too Easily," it's a melancholy affair.
Pronsky addresses mostly personal topics - love, relationships, doubt - from a variety of interesting angles. The opener "Hard Times" feels both like an admonition to a friend to get it together and a sly parable of the current economic crisis; "Fragile World" details the fragility of a new relationship with the clever opening couplet, "Little girls don't know what they're in for, Little boys don't know what's ahead."
Pronsky has been lauded in the past for her strong jazz-trained voice, but it's the maturation of her songwriting and arrangements on Viewfinder (with kudos to guitarist Rich Bennett who co-produced with Pronsky, and Scott Solter who mixed) that set it atop the current crop of singer-songwriter records.
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