Now Hear This — Zoe Fitzgerald Carter’s “Waterlines”

Don’t you love it when songs suddenly uplift you? That’s the feeling I had with the very first song on Zoe Fitzgerald Carter’s new LP, “Waterlines.” The song is called “Better Things to Do” and right away it establishes the beautiful melancholy of this extraordinary new album. Carter is steeped in the folk-rock-country music of the 1970s, when she grew up, and her new album has the heart-tugging, tightly produced feel of Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Randy Newman, Lowell George and Little Feat and the other great LPs of that decade.

In her liner notes, Carter ( who’s also a fine writer) comments that the album was mostly recorded (at legendary Fantasy Studios in Berkeley) in the “before times” when musicians could actually crowd into recording rooms. After we descended into the long plague year, we’re now emerging in a new era filled with “hope and sanity and expectation,” she writes, and a few of the songs on “Waterlines” are indeed playful and funky. But even though Carter wrote the songs on her new album before the pandemic, “Waterlines” somehow captures the strange mood of the time — somber, bittersweet, soulful. Like the opening tune, the LP seems mostly a reckoning with the past with all its lost joys and sorrows. The requiem feeling is perhaps even stronger because Fantasy, where a stellar group of studio musicians came together for Carter, has since shut down.

But if music like the songs on “Waterlines” can make you weep, it also makes you feel more alive. I’ve played the LP all the way through several times now — and when was the last time you listened to an album as an album?

OK, now time for full disclosure. I know Carter, I count her as a friend. I’ve watched her play live (in those good old days). In fact, she once took out her guitar after a little dinner party at my house and treated us to a few tunes (including John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.”) But I would never sing the praises of a friend’s LP, film or book unless I genuinely was moved to do so.

When you hear something as beautiful as this album, you just feel lucky that you know the artist. Do yourself a favor and listen for yourself.

Zoe Fitzgerald Carter