Edie Carey: Another Kind of Fire

Edie Carey performs sensitive, self-penned, folk-rock songs with grace. She puts her heart on her sleeve and tries to honestly tell you how she feels and what she thinks. “I can be so brave when I’m drunk”, we hear in one song. “I’m not gonna lie to you/I don’t know what I’m doing”, she admits in another. “I know how they talk behind my back,” she confides elsewhere. The thing is, Carey really doesn’t have much to say. She’s earnest enough, and she’s not dumb. But she really doesn’t offer any great insights into the world in which we live. Her voice is pleasant and at times intimate, but there’s always a distance between what she’s saying and how she says it. It’s like going to a movie with strangers. You might laugh together and cry at the same scenes, but when you exit, you still don’t know each other. The movie analogy seems apt because the best song here, “Hollywood Ending”, both opens and closes the disc. The lilting tune belies the hopefulness of the title phrase. We might want life to always work out right, but like this disc, too often it disappoints.