Toshi Reagon - Have You Heard

Genre folk Publisher Righteous Babe External Links Official Website Righteous Babe

Toshi Reagon is a singer-songwriter from Washington, DC who grew up with a healthy exposure to classic blues and traditional folk artists thanks to her musician parents. As she grew up, Reagon also developed a taste for the more blues-based classic rock bands, and this influence shows through on her newest release. Have You Heard marks the seventh album in a career that began over twenty years ago with 1985's critically acclaimed Demonstrations.

While Reagon's guitar work is key, ranging from boisterous strumming to subdued finger-picking, her voice is her main asset. It's a huge, earthy voice that is equally comfortable with belting it out and with shaving microtones off the blue notes of songs like "Dream" and "Down to the Water." "Have You Heard" opens the album with its rollicking question, answered in the affirmative: "I am sure it's a sign of the Lord," laying out the positive sense of spiritually that undergirds the rest of the album. But this is not purely a heavenly spirituality, detached from the more sensuous aspects of life on earth: "22 Hours" is a lust song, its understated musical arrangement conveying a sense of restraint as the singer waits for her lover to return so they can spend another "22 hours in a day" together. On "Didn't I Tell You," Reagon's voice exhibits the firmness and flavor of a hock of pork: it's a feast for the ears, firm and wonderfully textured.

Things change up with the wah-wah guitar that opens "Ooh Wee," a celebration of a woman's eyes for a new suitor. "Building Blues" is the album's keystone, a lengthy spiritual that plays off a house as religion metaphor. "Down to the Water" gets the most political of any song the record: "You're sick, I can tell / by the way you built that jail / never country only land / try to hold and try to expand." Bush's Guantanamo Bay, anyone? But the political is rendered with a poetic subtlety so it matches the record's overarching tone. "Soul-n-Deep" is a rock tune with a catchy chorus that's not a world away from, say, Le Tigre. The album ends with Reagon's bluesy, soulful take on Elvis' classic "Heartbreak Hotel," a misstep that renders the song with an overdose of pathos. But it's the exception to the balance of earth and sky the album displays, which, coupled with Reagon's worthy voice, makes for great listening.