9 April 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Brendan Kiefer
Sydney Wayser hears herself with a different set of ears than most of those people in her peer group. We received a very informal introduction to the young beauty from New York at the South By Southwest Festival last month in Austin. She handed us a copy of her debut album, Silent Parade, and as the night got old and wrinkled later on, we listened on a computer where we were staying. Hers is an immediately poignant voice of natural charm, of that smokiness that draws us to Chan Marshall and yet there’s a florist’s knack for arrangement and fragrance and for color schemes in her songs about that confusing age when love is a mountain and a natural disaster, long before it becomes something rational or as close to it as it will ever get. This song, which didn’t get nearly the love it deserved on OurStage in the month of March, is the kind of song that will hit a lot of father’s of daughters sometime around their early-to-mid teens when it’s all of a sudden shocking the frequency at which the girl’s gone from the house, out with friends and living her own life. It will probably kill us, this realization and the crippling fear that comes along with it no matter the reassurances. Wayser has made a record about a girl who’s changed, not changing, into a woman, though no one’s ever ready to see that. She sings about someone’s taste lingering in her mouth and though innocent and in no way dirty, that’s a boy she’s singing about and that kiss is one scary revelation.
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