Description
The long awaited debut album from Music Oz award winning singer songwriter.
This album has 15 songs which will carry you through a range of emotions, beautifully sung with Glenys’ warm voice which moves across the genres of jazz ,folk,blues and ballads. Invites you into intimacy that makes you feel you are in the room with her singing just for you..
This album provides plenty of interest all the way through from the funny to the moving, well worth a listen.
CD Review by Tony Smith
Glenys Anderson shows clearly on this 2006 album that she loves singing and that she has a wicked sense of humour.
Her love of vocal expression is obvious on ‘Cry You A Waterfall’ (Kristina Olsen), ‘Carrickfergus’ (traditional), ‘Chocolate’ (Margie Hanley) and ‘Summertime’ (George Gershwin).
Her sense of fun and sharp wit are features of the other 11 original tracks.
Anderson pays tribute to friend and mentor Kristina Olsen and thanks Adrian Borsboom for backing vocals and Steve Weir for keyboards and resonator guitar.
Her main collaborator is Chris Jack who plays guitar, bass, mandolin and lap steel.
Jack’s instrumental break on ‘Summertime’ is evidence of his mastery of the guitar and his walking bass on ‘Baby Blues’ shows his versatility.
While Jack might provide unobtrusive but perfect accompaniment for Anderson’s singing, the original songs here suggest that they would fit neatly into a musical theatre setting.
Anderson’s clear diction and her ease with timing and rhythms in the delivery of the lyrics show rare control.
The songs would stand very well either alone (imagine Anderson standing spot-lit near a baby grand) or in the context of a musical telling a broader story.
While some of the songs are in first person ‘I’ or second person ‘you’, the listener is quickly made into an appreciative audience.
The songs and their delivery make you feel you have been treated to a show.
Among the crowd favourites must be the award nominee, ‘Teeth’, in which a woman aiming to impress her date smiles so widely that her dentures fall under the table.
Her efforts to retrieve them are hilarious.
In the same self-effacing mood are ‘Clayton’s Romance’ in which she finds that the Mister Perfect of her dreams always has faults below the surface and ‘Baby Blues’ in which a woman nearing fifty misses a period and wonders whether her sixth baby is on the way.
‘Growing Old’ has similar complaints, ‘used to have a body to die for, used to be perfect size eight, now designer clothes sit in the wardrobe while I valiantly try to lose weight’.
Perhaps ‘Loves’ Revenge’ explains some of the frustration she feels.
A couple of tracks really stand out.
The plight of the homeless is given voice in ‘Children of the Underground where do you sleep tonight, beneath some makeshift cardboard mound in some rat infested dive’.
In ‘Burnum’s song’ Anderson sings ‘You took my hand, showed me spirit flowing, through your eyes in this great land, Burnum you are my brother’.
Burnum Burnum claimed England for Australia’s Indigenous peoples.
There are other powerful songs on Glenys Anderson’s, Love Bites.
They ask questions about nightmare memories and about letting go and taking risks.
Such topics could descend into banality as they often do in the hands of pop songwriters.
Whether because of Anderson’s career in counselling and psychotherapy or because of her whimsical, self-deprecating sense of humour, her songs maintain a lightness that keeps listeners smiling.
