Falbo’s Comfort Zone in Times of Lockdown

courtesy of Kate Smith Productions

Chicago vocalist Josie Falbo began recording tracks for her new album, You Music Believe in Spring, in September of 2016. However, her sessions, which included working with a full orchestra of over 50 players, continued through this past April, which means that all thirteen on the songs on the album were not accounted for until after shelter-in-place had been imposed in response to COVID-19. Mixing was concluded the following May, and the album was released by Southport Records at the end of this past August.

Under current circumstances, one can call this album “the vocal equivalent of comfort food,” even if that was not the original intent of either Falbo or her Producer, Carey Deadman. Mind you, there is a healthy share of upbeat scat singing from Falbo; and Deadman’s arrangement of Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring” serves up soaring intricacies worthy of Brown’s own trumpet improvisations. Still, it is the heartfelt interpretations of quietude in songs like the title track and Billy Strayhorn’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing” that endow this album with the power to provide psychological shelter in the midst of seriously troubling times. If there is any shortcoming, it arises during Richard Rodgers’ “Manhattan,” when Falbo does not quite get the acrobatics of some of the more eccentric rhymes that Lorenz Hart evoked to account for Manhattan geography. I suspect that only a “real New Yorker” can facilely deliver Hart’s wordplay with the right sense of humor.