CD: Freedom by Jackie Bristow

When Jackie Bristow opened for a Daniel Lanois concert, the ace producer/songwriter/musician told his audience from the stage that she sang like a bird.

So she does. And now she's uncaged.

Free from the constraints of being a contracted and supported – but closely managed – songbird, the Gore-raised Bristow is now independent in the most liberating sense of the word; tempered but unburdened by her professional and personal past, exulting in open skies.

Freedom is her third album, but the first she has produced herself, albeit with expert collaborators from Australia and from her most recent home, one of the United States' most vibrantly musical cities, Austin, Texas.

The Austin edge is there in Freedom, as musicians create rocky outcrops over which her voice sometimes soars, sometimes just breathes.

You'll find musicians here from Jeff Young, who toured with Steely Dan, to John Mayer's drummer JJ Johnson, and backing vocalist Mahalia Barnes is Jimmy's daughter.

The songwriting, time and again, heads back home.

Bristow revisits the downsides of smalltown judgment and rude awakenings, but the departures from unhappy situations are better described in the ridiculously catchy Hightail, rather than anything of the tail-between-the-legs variety.

Here's healing, refreshment and revival aplenty, winding up with the grace-note conclusion of Aotearoa.

It's an uplifting album and no mistake.

- © Fairfax NZ News