{"id":41075,"date":"2008-08-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/i-need-to-love\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T07:31:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T07:31:32","slug":"i-need-to-love","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/i-need-to-love\/","title":{"rendered":"I Need To Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

To love is to risk everything, but love can be so compelling sometimes that you can\u2019t turn away even when you know you should.\u00a0 That\u2019s the message at the core of New York<\/st1:place><\/st1:state> singer-songwriter Amy Lennard\u2019s captivating debut album.\u00a0<\/o:p> <\/p>\n

The aptly-named I Need To Love<\/i> isn\u2019t completely new, since it carries over three of the five tracks from Lennard\u2019s brief, exceptional 2004 EP<\/a>.\u00a0 But it feels fresh and immediate in the way timeless music always does. These are songs that capture moments and feelings in a voice that\u2019s simultaneously intimate and confessional, universal and directive.\u00a0 This is a writer who\u2019s learned some hard lessons along the way, and shares them now in song.<\/p>\n

You can feel the Lucinda Williams influence all over I Need To Love<\/i>\u2019s dusty, sometimes stark Americana stylings, especially as Lennard\u2019s earthy, rangy voice rises and falls with the emotion of each track.\u00a0 Kickoff cut \u201cI Wish It Were Mine\u201d \u2013 which also opened her EP — employs all of Lennard\u2019s tools, a wryly melancholic portrait of envy in which the truth underlying the entire song slips out only at the end, as the narrator\u2019s refrain about her perpetually, maddeningly satisfied friend — \u201cI really want her to be happy\u201d \u2013 sheds a single word and becomes \u201cI really want to be happy.\u201d\u00a0 Whammo — that\u2019s great songwriting.<\/p>\n

The next five cuts are all new material and it\u2019s uniformly strong, from the lilting \u201cseize the moment\u201d exhortation \u201cForever Tonight\u201d to the spot-on expose of human nature that is \u201cI Can\u2019t Change You.\u201d\u00a0 Of special note is \u201cBroken,\u201d from whose lyric the album title is taken.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to imagine an artist more emotionally naked than Lennard allows herself to be as she wails \u201cI need to love \/ I need to open \/ I need to hold \/ The part of me that\u2019s broken.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other two holdovers from her previous EP follow, and they\u2019re outstanding.\u00a0 \u201cHoly Night\u201d Is a hymn to life inside a fleeting moment of bliss (\u201cNow we\u2019re just resting here \/ There\u2019s no hope and there\u2019s no fear \/ On this holy night\u201d) and \u201cEl Paso\u201d captures beautifully the supercharged moment when you fall hard for someone (\u201cI love the way when we talked \/ felt like I was singing inside\u201d) \u2013 even someone you can\u2019t have.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Will\u201d is another highlight, an intense steady-builder in the mold of early Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers that finds a tortured Lennard working up the nerve to the leave her two-timing lover, trying to convince herself that \u201cI will, I will say goodbye to you \/ I will, I will, I will forget about you.\u201d\u00a0 In the closing \u201cDream,\u201d Lennard\u2019s mood lightens and she states her intentions going forward — \u201cGonna let myself dream \/ Gonna open, open up my heart and see\u201d — announcing at the end \u201cI think I\u2019m ready.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s the perfect finish to a song cycle about preparing yourself to take that big risk.<\/p>\n

I Need To Love<\/i> was self-produced by Lennard, with most of the tracks recorded and mixed by Ben Wisch (Marc Cohn, David Wilcox, Kathy Mattea, Aimee Mann).\u00a0 The resulting sound is superb, clean and crisp without losing any of the warmth and groove and space of these arrangements.<\/p>\n

I always hesitate to overpraise an artist who\u2019s just beginning to find an audience.\u00a0 Creating unrealistic expectations seems almost as unkind a thing to do as to harshly critique a performer in that position.\u00a0 But sometimes you have to stand on principle.\u00a0 Amy Lennard has a gift for crafting songs that reveal deeper and more dangerous truths than most songwriters not named James Taylor are willing to expose.\u00a0 In doing so she taps into the kind of visceral, universal emotions that resonate on an almost instinctual level and make for truly memorable \u2013 yes, timeless — songwriting.<\/p>\n

So there \u2013 I said it.\u00a0 Lucinda Williams, James Taylor, Amy Lennard.\u00a0 These three names belong in the same sentence; you just don\u2019t know it yet.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to educate yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29495,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7189],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41075","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-amy-lennard","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52093,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41075\/revisions\/52093"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41075"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41075"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}