Listening to The Life You Save feels safe, not in the sense of risk-aversion, but in the way Wasner creates a tender space in which to dismantle what had seemed so sure, to see without judgment all the ways you might have been kidding yourself all along. Her soft yet rich voice is innately consoling, empathetic. Often the simplicity of these songs make them feel like incantations, her sentiments strengthening over the course of a track, as with “Afraid,” about how life robs our innocence; or like deeply humane sermons, such as “Keep Me in the Dark,” about the various futile ways we can try to resist love, which succumbs to a beautiful flowing stream of a chorus. As “The Enemy” countenances the “violence upon violence” of conflicting perceptions imposing upon one another, the vocal reverb and expectant, repeating acoustic figures suggest genuine anticipation for what might lie beyond those assumptions; one of the record’s rare squalling guitar solos desecrates them joyfully.
When Wasner considers how potentially unproductive it may sometimes have been to help others, it’s never in the trite self-serving sense of selfishness masquerading as boundaries or putting your own oxygen mask on first. There is a moonlit peace to “Instead of Calling,” even as she frets about abandoning her role in triage. The calm, repeating chorus of “Not Yet Free” suggests sitting with pain rather than trying to work past it. She saves her harshest words for her former coping mechanisms, but still beds the revelations in gently. “I can go on but I’m not proud of it,” she sings on the lovely firefly glimmer of “Close to Home,” shrugging off her former delusions. “It’s pride that will not let me break,” she sings on “Pride,” where a frazzled guitar part imperceptibly softens to pedal steel, an affecting shift in emotional weather. For anyone who has struggled to let themselves off the hook, who always holds tight amid a state of collapse, she offers a glimpse of what it might be like to relinquish the tension.
