Eleanor Friedberger – Make Me a Song

But out of what, Eleanor?

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[5.00]Alfred Soto: It has an impressive tentativeness, as if Eleanor Friedberger were thinking out her performance and song at the microphone — and this was before I glanced at the title. The wobbly electronics add to the sense of dislocation; so do the opening guitar strums sketching the vaguest evocations of 1964. Then in a voice buoyant in its calm Friedberger sings the hook over swelling keyboards (“There’s a B-flat where a wave every year,” she reminds listeners). By the time it ends “Make Me a Song” has summoned sixty years of pop history to its side and kept its secrets close.
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Julian Axelrod: For a guy who’s writing a Singles Jukebox blurb at this very moment, sometimes I have no idea how to talk about music. How do you articulate the ineffable highs and singular memories associated with your favorite songs, much less assign it a numerical score? Beneath its gentle guitar shimmers and easygoing springtime lope, “Make Me a Song” grapples with these kinds of big questions. Eleanor Friedberger sings with such warmth and affection for the simple act of sharing a song with someone special. Her words are tender and piercing, yet opaque; sometimes that connection is too deep for either of you to explain. It’s a song of devotion — to a loved one, to a higher power, to the self — from a woman who, fifteen years after her first song, is still searching for the kind of answers only music can provide.
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Katherine St Asaph: Why are the only female singer-songwriters allowed press coverage the ones who are so damn boring? This is like five minutes of a Tanita Tikaram song, except some of Tanita’s songs are actually engaging.
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Stephen Eisermann: This is going to sound really good playing against a montage of a white girl in her mid twenties visiting coffee shops, stapling some papers, and looking out windows longingly in some no-name rom-com later this year; however, that’s the only place I’ll ever want to hear it again.
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Will Adams: Songs about songs need not be so soporific; just ask Natasha Bedingfield. The LFO synths at the outset are nice, but by the second minute the jingle-jangle has worn thin, and there’s nothing left to save you from the reverb haze that clouds Friedberger’s vision.
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Edward Okulicz: Having held a long-standing and probably irrational hatred of The Fiery Furnaces and all things associated with them, it’s progress that I listen to this pleasantly burbling trifle and feel no reaction whatsoever other than that it should have been half its length.
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Rebecca A. Gowns: The song is so slight, a small humming kind of ditty, that the title of it seems less like an invitation to woo and more like a self-deprecating comment. It’s good for what it is, though — something in the vein of Christine McVie, complete with alto vocals and simple yearning phrases.
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