American Quilt
follows
Ballads
and
Revolution
, two albums where
Paula Cole
dove deep into the American Songbook.
Cole
performs a similar task here, but her ambition is a bit more ambitious. With
, she ties together the Great American Songbook with country, blues, folk, and jazz standards, all in an attempt to find commonality between styles and eras. The roots of the album lie in the sessions for
. She held some of the recordings she made in 2016 so they could find "rootsier" companions, which is what led to
.
relies on a few very familiar tunes -- "Nobody Knows You (When You're Down and Out)" sits alongside "Bye Bye Blackbird," and the record ends with "What a Wonderful World" -- but her arrangements are idiosyncratic without being showy. It's just enough to be fresh yet familiar, the slight left turns indeed drawing attention to commonalities instead of differences. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine