Published on May 7, 2003
Where does the border lie between admiration and imitation? When
do influences threaten to become inhibitions?
These are the hard questions faced by talents like as Nashville
singer-songwriter Melissa Gibson, who is perfectly frank about the
fact that her greatest influence is Mary Chapin Carpenter. Well,
yeah — it takes maybe sixty seconds of opener “Miles To Go”
to register Gibson’s devotion to Carpenter’s highly personal brand
of confessional country-folk. The subject matter, the
instrumentation, arrangements, chord changes, Gibson’s vocals —
taken as a whole, this track sounds like nothing so much as a lost
outtake from Carpenter’s 1996 album
A Place In The World.
Gibson’s adoption of an approach so closely identified with a
unique and well-known artist is a choice that’s simultaneously safe
and dangerous. On the positive side of the ledger,
Welcome To Stay, Gibson’s second independently published
disc, shimmers with warm melodies and well-crafted, mature lyrics.
It’s a consistently pleasant listen, the kind of soft-spoken,
thoughtful music that goes equally well sitting in the back yard on
a sunny day watching the kids play in the pool, or on a quiet,
rainy evening alone in the house.
And yet, the arrangements and lyrical approach — introspective,
wry, compassionate, analytical — are at times so thick with
Carpenter-isms that it can become disconcerting. This is
particularly the case on upbeat numbers like “The Right Road,”
where Gibson’s phrasing and inflections are dead-on MCC, lacking
only the truly remarkable honey-richness of Carpenter’s instrument.
She even mirrors Carpenter’s one weakness — the occasional
too-heavy reliance on an obvious metaphor, as in “Shade” (“And when
the heat is beating down on me / You are my shade”).
Fortunately, she’s able to break through at times with a voice
that’s truly her own, as on the lilting “No Room For Blue.” Better
yet, on slower tracks such as “The Journey” and “Sleep Well
Tonight” Gibson lets her phrasing stretch out and the real beauty
of her voice shines through. To get to the next level creatively,
Gibson needs to build on the confidence she displays on these
tracks. On others, there’s something careful about her singing —
her enunciation is at times a little too crisp and precise,
hindering the kind of relaxed, grooving, intimate performance that
these songs demand.
All in all,
Welcome To Stay offers much to enjoy and plenty of reasons
to keep an eye on Melissa Gibson. She has proven she’s a gifted
songwriter with a firm grasp of an appealing style; her next
challenge is to develop one that’s more fully her own.