Bella White recorded extra material while recording her album Among Other Things last year. She’s just released a handful of these tracks as a digital-only EP called Five For Silver. They are covers of songs that influenced her while growing up. The material was produced by Grammy-nominee Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty) and recorded in Wilson’s Topanga Canyon, California studio.
White’s versions are similar to the original tracks, but this is not karaoke. She puts her distinctive vocal stamp on each of the tunes. She opens with Neil Young‘s “Unknown Legend”. Shakey sang as a male who admired an independent female who rode a motorcycle and raised her kids without help. The damsel is mysterious as well as unheralded. White offers a more matter-of-fact approach as if all women have secret unrecognized strengths. Her voice accents the details by extending the vowel sounds and letting her voice crack just a little to show the hardness of the protagonist’s life (“Grew up in a smaaaalll town”) as well its sweetness “Long bloooond haaaair flying in the wind”). The good and the bad get equal weight. That’s the point. Young’s composition celebrates the extraordinary nature of an ordinary person who does what she does to find freedom in a constricted world. White shows how this is more the norm than Young realizes.
The highway as a metaphor can also be found in Bella White’s take on Gram Parson‘s “Luxury Liner”, best known as interpreted by Emmylou Harris. The production uses musical instruments to mimic the sounds of a semi-truck going down the highway. Harris smoothly delivered her lyrics. White travels a more crowded road with unknown obstacles. She’s a “long lost soul” who speeds as a way to distract her from the thoughts of a lover who has left her. The combination of the narrator’s emotional fragility and the heavy load of the truck (“40 tons of steel”) works as a metaphor for danger. White’s voice purposely lacks Harris’ blithe confidence. She declares her loneliness.
The other three songs are less well-known: “I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)” by Ted Lucas, “Concrete and Barbed Wire” by Lucinda Williams, and “Nobody Dies Anymore” by Jeff Tweedy. Bella White’s take on these tracks is to make them sound much more traditional than the originals, especially in Williams’ tune, which is almost unrecognizable. It’s not just the instrumentation and the production. White sings with a lilt and a twang that betrays her bluegrass roots. Williams originally wrote the tune about the falling of the Berlin Wall. White reveals the universality of the walls between people that may have nothing to do with political differences.
She offers a more folkie take on the other two tunes, which are about the death of love and the end of life, with the acoustic guitar taking the lead. These cuts are overwhelmingly sad, as their topics suggest. The title of Bella White’s EP Five for Silver comes from the magpie rhyme about good things about to happen. That doesn’t seem appropriate here unless one takes it as the five songs themselves are gifts White is giving to her fans hungry for more after her 2023 release.