Mikaela Davis: Graceland Way Album Review

The harp is not an instrument of slyness, wryness, or the earth. At least twice the size of a human body, it has to be held in the arms, its vibrations traveling through the player as they perform. It’s nearly impossible to play it and not feel kind of “woo.” With few clear precedents, Mikaela Davis draws a connection between the instrument’s almost involuntary transcendence and the cosmic mysticism of jam bands like the Grateful Dead (whose music she also performs as a member of the tribute band the Grateful Shred). Where artists like Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby pushed the instrument inventively into mostly instrumental jazz, Davis redirects it toward a more singer-songwriterly inwardness.

I first discovered Davis over a decade ago, when I stumbled on her harp cover of “Twilight” by Elliott Smith on YouTube—she is now signed to Kill Rock Stars, the same label as Smith. In that video, her performance seemed oriented toward showcasing technical ability, overriding the song’s directness with display. Today, she moves in the opposite direction. A classically trained and skilled harpist, she scales back, placing less emphasis on the instrument in favor of a more immediate mode of address.

On her latest studio album, Graceland Way, Davis plays her harp in simple fourths, with occasional arpeggios and runs. She rarely foregrounds the instrument, using it instead as a contrapuntal voice alongside distinctly Americana-leaning electric guitar lines. Recorded at Glendale’s UHF Studio, Davis worked closely with producer-bassist Dan Horne and guitarist John Lee Shannon, inaugurating a new songwriting partnership—one that trades the solitary melancholia of her earlier albums for something more open-ended and conversational.

Graceland Way—a perfectly Americana album title—takes its name from the street in the L.A. hillside home where she made the album. Inspired by its surroundings, the album is light, soothing, loose, and mostly played in a major key. All throughout, there are very obvious rootsy rock signifiers that sound lifted from the ’60s The guitars sound like Gram Parsons; clean, lightly overdriven and spindly, each member of the band leaving space for one another and for Davis’ lyrics as she sings about the natural world through an astral lens.

Davis occasionally destabilizes this very familiar soundtrack with sly production tricks from Horne. On “Nothin’s on the Radio,” she suddenly pans the background instrumentation hard into the left channel while fading the lead guitars on the right, ending with the effect of an FM dial switching between stations, from a Kid Cudi sample to a news broadcast. On “(Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses,” she disrupts the paint-by-numbers Americana with a reversed-delay harp loop in the middle eight.

If the arrangements flirt with cliché, then the lyrics dive straight into it. While the harp tends to invite a high literariness (Joanna Newsom being the most obvious example), Davis’ lyrics are very hammy, though that doesn’t feel like a failure so much as a deliberate flattening out of expression. “Stars are bursting when we collide,” she sings on “Junk Love”; “Take me higher, baby, like my favorite song” on “Nothin’s on the Radio.” Just like the instrumentation, she pushes cliché so far that it turns into her own idiosyncrasy. Davis’ world is easy to float through, as she finds her place in its simplicity.