Mary Fahl‘s new Love & Gravity is out! It’s the singer and songwriter’s first full-length release since From the Dark Side of the Moon, her recreation of the iconic Pink Floyd album (reviewed in issue 13 of Pop & Jazz).
I’ve only heard Love & Gravity once, but I’ll say up front that it was the first of many listens to come.
Listen, and watch, as Fahl makes Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” entirely her own.
Understated Fahl isn’t. Between the tone of her arrangement, with its delicious echoes of Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Blue Sky,” and the pace and power of her delivery, Fahl’s reading may be, for me, the definitive recording of this song, which was so beautifully sung by both Judy Collins and Mitchell herself, each quite early in her career.
Fahl draws out the gravitas in Mitchell’s words, finding degrees of pain and acceptance that suit a singer in middle age, without losing the childlike wonder that powers the song. Mitchell’s own later interpretation, from Both Sides Now (2000), is also superb, but I’ll take Fahl’s intensity over Mitchell’s somberness, if it comes to that! (Which, thankfully, it doesn’t.)
Read more about Fahl and listen to her music at her website.
18 October 2013