Now there’s a title we like. Dublin troubadour Alice Jago has had this album in the can for a while, hatching her eggs, biding her time. It’s a patience that speaks not of reticence but an innate confidence in a collection of songs that won’t be tethered to tide nor trend. Born Stubborn is a woodstained, homegrown sort of a record. The sound is bucolic roots rock not a million miles from Neil’s Harvest, a breezier Gillian Welch, a folkier Rickie Lee Jones, a touch of Dusty in the vocal. And Jago can sell a song in the subtlest and slyest of ways.
The title tune is a slow sway with transcendental middle-eight, ‘Cotton On Girl’ a self-administered slap across the chops stitched with banjo, handclaps and communal choruses. Both feel like they were written 200 years ago, and might well be written again 200 years from now. Jago also seems to have an instinct for just the right modulation required to lift a song out of merit and into distinction. She does waltzes, she does shuffles, she does winsome and wistful and exasperated and lovelorn, often within the same verse.
Beautifully produced by Karl Odlum, this is the sound of musicians in a room, placing deft hands on the bones of tunes that have been carefully conceived and nurtured. Sample the exquisite swing of ‘New St. South’, or the tired-and-emotional slowdance of ‘Warrior’, or the dusky jazz of ‘Sea Song’, or the Goodnight Moon beauty of ‘Lullaby’, her finest and most fragile vocal. Alice Jago is a girl you don’t hear every day.