About On The Water (March 8, 2024)

From salt water to sink water, from a cup of tea to the whole entire ocean, Lisa Bastoni’s latest album, On The Water, is a cycle of twelve vivid songs exploring observations of daily life and memories washed ashore.

Produced by Sean Staples, On The Water was recorded live over the course of three days at Zachariah Hickman's Greedy Beast Studios in Watertown MA. The album features Sean Staples, Rich Hinman, James Rohr, and Chris Anzalone, with special guest vocalists Mark Erelli, Kris Delmhorst, and Rose Cousins. On The Water is Bastoni's first full-length release since 2019's How We Want to Live.

About:

Lisa Bastoni (Northampton, MA) is a 2022 & 2023 New England Music Award nominee (Roots), 2020 & 2019 Boston Music Award Nominee (Folk) and winner of 2019 New Folk at the esteemed Kerrville Folk Festival. In addition to her work in music, Lisa Bastoni is an accomplished visual artist and teacher, and mother to two young children. Lisa Bastoni has opened for/performed with Lori McKenna, Dar Williams, Regina Spektor, The Secret Sisters, Teddy Thompson, Rose Cousins, Mark Erelli, Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams, and many more. She performs regularly around New England, and occasionally beyond.

"Bright, attactive and wonderfully poetic..." (Americana-UK)

"Expressive, well-crafted songs..." (Glide Magazine)

"A beautiful melancholia...real and human." (Red Line Roots)

"Americana of the highest order, along the lines of Patty Griffin or Gretchen Peters" (Maverick UK)

(REVIEW: Freak Scene, March 8, 2024)

Lisa Bastoni offers aching life lessons

Let’s just say what we’re all thinking: New England, and especially Massachusetts, is a stronghold of singer-songwriters who excel at writing top-notch songs that make you swallow hard and wonder why your eyes are damp. (That is what you were thinking, right?) Northampton singer Lisa Bastoni ranks among the best of them.

Bastoni zeroes in on the small details that make up everyday life on her new album, On the Water: dishes piled so high in the sink that you can’t turn on the faucet, singing along off-key with a song on the radio, the upholstery pattern on your best friend’s couch when you were a kid. They’re the images we carry with us, and Bastoni uses them to frame more complicated themes on a dozen new songs. On the Water is steeped in the New England singer-songwriter tradition, on songs built around acoustic guitars and piano, with accents from pedal steel and dusky electric guitars — rootsy, but not quite country (for the most part).

She’s an evocative songwriter who sings with the wisdom of someone who hasn’t always come by her insight the easy way, and the ache in Bastoni’s voice contains as much compassion as it does sorrow. It’s powerful combination, whether she’s singing about two inexperienced youngsters in way over their heads — “just babies, having a baby” — on “Honeymoon in Disneyland,” or brushing away her own tears on the waltz-time weeper “Only Goodbye” as she explores long-distance yearning with earthy harmony vocals from Mark Erelli.

On the Water isn’t heartrending all the way through: Bastoni lets a droll sense of humor show, too, particularly on “Let’s Look at Houses.” Co-written with Willi Carlisle, the song has a honky-tonk feel with bold steel guitar licks from Rich Hinman and lyrics about holding hands, reprising youthful lust and ogling houses out of your price range. Elsewhere, Bastoni celebrates getting out and never going back on “Hometown” (with harmonies from Kris Delmhorst), and choosing a path based on love, even as doubts creep in, on the muted “Cheap Wine.”

She closes the album with the spellbinding “Out at Sea,” with a first-person narrator singing to a lover who only feels whole out on the water, while she is adrift in loneliness and longing without ever leaving dry land. Muted drums and a spare arrangement of guitars and piano lend the song an overcast feel accentuated by Bastoni’s somber voice (and harmonies from Rose Cousins). It’s a haunting way to wrap up On the Water, and so gorgeous it’s hard to only listen once. 

—Eric Danton, Freak Scene (A Western Mass. Music Newsletter)