If you pay attention to the indie beat, you already know that the folk trend is getting harder and harder to ignore. With more and more singer/songwriters coming out of the woodwork, keeping up with some of the better players in a specific scene can be difficult, but this is perhaps motivation for Michelle A. Jones in her new single “Two Dogs & a Rat.” Instead of playing to a theme, Jones is letting her smoky harmonies create a mood all on their own, and her relentless use of colorful melodicism in place of what would be traditional poeticisms is quite intriguing.
The first thing I really fell in love with in this song and its video was the lack of pretentiousness with which we’re being told the story at hand, and had there been a singer/songwriter with greater hipster inclinations, this probably would not have been the case. There’s no self-righteousness to this performance, but instead, a humanity that comes from being 100% authentic with your audience, eliminating the distance that exists between an artist recording inside of a studio and listeners who are experiencing the music from the comfort of their own home.
This percussion only mildly pulsates in the background here as opposed to circling the string play with a heavy presence in the mix, and I imagine that with a headier drum element it wouldn’t have been as effective as it is in this instance. There’s no pushing from the bottom end in “Two Dogs & a Rat” because there doesn’t need to be; Michelle A. Jones can capture the rhythm with nothing more than the verses she’s singing, and thus a more formidable beat would have only made the rhythm less fluid and bulkier. Efficiency is quite an important element to have in your sound, and it’s one this artist has down excellently here.
Sweeping balladry with a whimsical heart is a lot harder to locate in the mainstream folk scene than it is in the underground, but what we’ve got in front of us with “Two Dogs & a Rat” is all the more a rare gem to encounter. This is a personal song that doesn’t ask for much more than a casual ear lent in its direction, and at a time where ego and pomp have become all too common a pair of features in this genre of music, what Michelle A. Jones is playing is pretty sweet indeed.
