The Civil Wars’ debut album, Barton Hollow, is honest, heartbreaking, uplifting and as real as it gets.
Made up of Joy Williams and John Paul White, this new group has taken the Nashville music scene by storm. And with their recent appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, they will surely take the nation and world by storm, too.
You shouldn’t try doing homework while listening to the record, as it’s hard to sit there not eagerly listening and waiting for the next line to relate to your life. The album does the extraordinary thing of taking all aspects of love and putting them onto a four and a half inch disk.
The album starts off with the lingering track “20 Years.” Already, just one track in, you are ready for a story to be told to you through song.
A high spot of the album for me is the song “Posison and Wine.” The song, which was featured on NBC’s Grey’s Anatomy, is the one that propelled the duo to stardom.
The lyrics capture all sides of love. When Williams sings Your hands can heal / your hands can bruise, you can really feel the emotion and truth she presents with her voice. The song takes the good and the bad of love and compares them, leaving you not knowing what to feel.
The title track for the album, “Barton Hollow” is Americana in its purest form. The song, written about White’s childhood home in Loretto, Tenn., is one that almost everyone can relate to.
Life is hard a lot of the times, and sometimes it feels as if God will never forgive us of our sins. We start over several times, but no matter how far we run away from things, we have to face consequences at some point.
My favorite track of the album may be the most country of them all. “Forget Me Not” starts off with the sound of an acoustic guitar and a violin that made my ears perk up, trying to figure out exactly what the song is about. The harmony that Williams and White employ in this song is breathtaking.
It seems as if they are sending the message to one another at the same time through song. At the beginning it feels like the two long for each others presence, but then at the end they are both going home to stay.
The record is real. The pair recorded each song as if they were playing it live. They didn’t use autotune or any other enhancers that most artists use nowadays. The pure, live nature of each song makes you feel as if you’re sitting right in front of them.
There is always that place we can come back to for comfort, and I think that The Civil Wars have found it. And we’ve found it in their music
The album releases tomorrow, Feb. 1.
For more information about The Civil Wars and who Joy Williams and John Paul White really are, check out the videos below.
Want to see the interview in full? Click here.