Taylor Edwards - Born In July (The Album)
Empire Records
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California-born Taylor Edwards is a country-pop singer who grew up in the Deep South. Gaining a few million views on YouTube as a high schooler in Bentonville, Arkansas, she moved to Nashville ten years ago to study songwriting and music business at Belmont University. Being social media savvy, she made a big splash with her song Call Your Sister, with over 100,000 videos being created on TikTok and shared across social media. This coincided with the release of her 2021 EP, which has now been expanded into this 15-track album debut. Taylor’s songs are charming tales of everyday life as she boldly explores the transition from youth to adulthood that all too often takes us by surprise. She turns a traumatic life period into narrative songs that strike right at the heart … perhaps the least pretentious concept album you’ll find. Kudos to Taylor and her musical collaborators for providing a sumptuous soundtrack to help ease her listeners along life’s uncertain adventure. Listening to the album in full is akin to bingeing a particularly compelling TV show: Both pull you in with characters that feel just as real as you or me, who populate a world we’d like to escape to as she administers a balm for anxious minds.
Her songs don’t move with the rhythm and pace of an earnest country strummer but rather with the ethereality of something more worldly. There's both a lavish, vivid imagination and an intense intimacy at play … haunting, grown-up real-life scenarios. Taylor gets to the very heart and soul of the uncertainty of life as she explores homesickness, romantic break-ups, mental health struggles and takes on a positive stance to still being single in your late twenties. She tackles her own insecurities, the kind that affect all of us, in Mean To Me. A gentle finger-snapping melody with an echoing ooh-ooh chorus; it’s just like listening to lines from a journal as she outlines all that is wrong with herself in a song that works as a healing balm. There is a meditation on loss and break-up on Monday. It’s rooted in the acoustic singer-songwriter tradition and if it was merely that, it’d be a well-done genre piece. But then the chorus kicks in, with its layered vocals, piano, and strings, and its beauty hits you like a punch to the solar plexus.
Right up the acoustic based alley, 8 Months sneaks in other subtle instruments such as banjo … jovial and innocent, never once letting you escape its irresistible charm. She knows how to pack some emotion into the bytes to give her stuff some real bite. Catch Myself is an elegant track with a subtly gorgeous arrangement and vocals, recalling an old flame that can never be rekindled. Not Supposed To Know Each Other Yet follows the same romantic trail but is belied and ultimately denied by the lively nature of the work, with the emphasis of moving on to someone knew. In addition to the dozen tracks, she rounds up the album with alternative versions of I’m Sorry, given a delicate duo treatment with Josh Kerr, Not Supposed To Know Each Other (The Sad Version), without the happy ending and Call Your Sister (The Sister Version). In the latter, she offers sibling advice to her sister, who is 17 years younger. Though more personal, the lyrical message still rings with universal appeal as she expertly balances sisterhood, longing, fear, and doubt.
September 2022