Singer-songwriter Ana Egge isn’t quite 30 years old, but her husky voice has the worldliness of a musician twice her age, and most of the songs on her fourth album, Out Past the Lights (Grace/ParkinSong), sound like the musings of a battle-scarred survivor. Her delicate acoustic arpeggios, boxy chord progressions, and ebullient pop-folk leads could easily have emanated from a late-60s coffeehouse, and her music owes a clear debt to Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian. But she and coproducer Jason Mercer fill out the songs with rich textures–pedal steel whines, moody, muted trumpet, and judicious cello, banjo, and fiddle. Egge can project guilelessness: on “Straight to My Head” she purrs, “I wanna be soft as the air / Disappear before your eyes and wake up in your bed,” and her breathy mewl on “Motorcycle” turns the highway-as-freedom metaphor into an innocent’s fantasy. But she can also cut deep: “Stone Bone” is a bluegrass-flavored tale of a woman’s collapse, and “Wedding Dress,” a story of love, loss, and desperation in middle America, depicts a bridal gown as a weapon of conquest, “sealed away like a secret shotgun.” –David Whiteis
