“Swimming“
from the album Water for the Day
2008
iTunes
Chicago’s Shelley Short seems singularly able to combine an idiosyncratic approach to acoustic guitar-based songwriting with a warm, welcome, easy-to-listen-to vibe. This ain’t no freak folk, in other words. But Short’s music does have its subtler oddities, including dissonant chords, unexpected sounds, and offbeat arrangements.
Listen, for example, to the minimal accompaniment utilized in the verse — a series of deliberate, three-note patterns, based on the simple ascensions we hear in the introduction but continually blurred by unexpected harmonics. Throughout the song, when she sings the verses, the accompaniment sticks to these three-note patterns, without any other rhythm or flourish — a simple, unostentatious, but actually very strange way to go about things.
When we get to the chorus, the 1-2-3 rhythm of the three-note pattern is reflected now in the acoustic guitar strum, and the melody slows down to one syllable per triplet. And so without (I don’t think) changing the time signature, or the instrumentation in any major way, the chorus sounds like a whole different musical place than the verse did. Again, it’s subtle, but distinctive. And get a load of that burbly guitar sound she uses in the second verse, to add to the song’s watery setting. Very cool, but if you don’t listen carefully you might not notice.
“Swimming” comes from the full-length Water for the Day, due out April 22 on Hush Records.