Blue Note

Cosy Sheridan Returns

As with artists of any medium, musicians are sometimes faced with critics who call their latest works “departures” and “evolutions.” Most often, such words are used to convey shifts in sound, direction and perspective, and occasionally lead to exclamations that the work in question may in fact be the artist's “best to date.” Usually, works that inspire such description are indeed remarkable, but the problem for critics is often one of being so thoroughly blind sided by a specific work that more analytical words simply don't come to the fore of their weird writers' brains. Such is the case, as you may have guessed, with Cosy Sheridan's latest release, The Pomegranate Seed.

It's a record written, according to Sheridan, as an exploration of the modern woman; of appetite, body image and myth in modern culture—”a one-woman show of songs and vignettes.” Rather than simply expanding upon her acclaimed wink-of-the-eye brand of cleverness and propensity for lyrical content few singer-songwriters of her generation have the muscle to take on, Sheridan went for broke on the new record, her seventh thus far. The record, in fact, is based upon Sheridan's two-act stage play of the same title. Already one of folk music's most talented and fastest-rising stars, Sheridan has never been one for stagnation. It follows then that she would desire to take to a new stage with a new form of artistic expression.

What the record seems to say is that not only has Sheridan found her songwriting self, she's come to a place from which she is able to survey the world in which we live and contextualize if for other human beings, particularly women. The songs span the oft passed over territory between the boundaries of optimism and hopefulness, and the darkness of the human experience. The Pomegranate Seed is Sheridan's soul bled directly to disc—imagine the live experience.