There’s a reason New York City singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Sheri Miller got the best of the best to back her up on her five-song EP. She’s that good. With the chutzpah to reach out to producer Kevin Killen (U2) and assemble a dream-team like bassist Will Lee (The Fab Faux), drummer Charley Drayton (Neil Young) and guitarist Gerry Leonard (Suzanne Vega), Miller’s folky/sexy vocalizing plays perfectly with her strumming and the added color of Leonard’s ukulele (the hot instrument right now) and Andy Snitzer’s keyboards.
The songs stick. Instantly catchy, memorable, radio-friendly, someone should sign this gal! Hey, anyone who writes a song about spooning in bed (“Spoons”) with your honey gets my vote (“Curled up in this room/I’m melting into you”). In the title track, she lays it out: “So lay down your cards, I’ll lay down my defenses.” She plays “Satellite” with a strange kind of tuning but it works in a spacey, hippie-girl kind of way: “Flock of seagulls circling the beach/I wonder, do they mate, each one to each?/Fall in love, and when one dies, they grieve?”
Miller has a way with words and knows how to put them across. With the kind of musical bed provided here, there’s no telling how far she could go. She admits in “Hungry For The Truth” that she’s “scared of everything” and in “Everybody Feels This Way Sometimes,” she goes even further: “Sometimes I’m weary/I could lay down and die.” Hopefully, this musical descendent of the master of confessional, Joni Mitchell, won’t do that anytime soon.
In A Word: Promising
