Margaret Glaspy grew up playing fiddle and trombone and listening to early-’00’s Top 40 pop. She hung around in the Boston folk scene after briefly attending Berklee College of Music and eventually settled amongst New York’s singer-songwriter community. Along the way, Glaspy released a pair of EPs, beginning with Homeschool, a solo-acoustic offering that highlighted her compelling, nasally warble.
Several years later, Glaspy has arrived with her full-length debut Emotions and Math, a collection of compact grunge-rock and breezy torch songs that mark a decisive departure from the quiet, spare softness of her past recordings. After starting off singing meandering, exploratory folk (see the modernist recitation of “Know My Name/To Be Heard and Be Had”) on her debut Glaspy has developed a newfound knack for pop hooks and easy melodies.
If the songs on Emotions and Math, which follow conventional structures and hover in the two-three minute range, have polished over some of Glaspy’s intriguing eccentricities as a vocalist, they also show off her refined focus as a songwriter. On the ’90s-Liz Phair-indebted title track, Glaspy establishes herself as an uncanny chronicler of everyday neuroses, outsourcing her anxieties about a long distance relationship to the numbing tasks of calendar keeping and number crunching “the days ‘till you’re back.”
Two tracks later, she channels her anger inwards on the swaggering rocker “You and I,” blaming herself for letting a lackluster love linger too long: “Tonight I’m a little too turned on to talk about us,” she sings in front of a punchy guitar line. “Tomorrow I’ll be too turned off and won’t give a fuck.” Glaspy asserts her indifference with so much confidence that what might be a moment of despair instead scans as comforting, if not downright celebratory. It’s one of many instances on Emotions and Math in which Glaspy reserves her deepest empathy for her characters during their lowest moments, when their flaws are getting the best of them and their only sense of reassurance might be knowing that their peers are, more likely than not, fucking up just as mightily.
At their best, these songs share the self-scrutinizing intimacy of Elliott Smith and the imaginative melodic intonations of Joni Mitchell, two of Glaspy's most obvious influences. Whether she’s writing from the point of view of a parent giving advice to their lonely child (“Parental Guidance”) or acting out imaginary conversations about her deepest insecurities (“You Don’t Want Me”), Glaspy is a lyricist who can toggle between distanced storytelling and open-hearted self-examination with equal ease.
Compiled from years worth of accumulated material, Emotions and Math suspends time and chronology as the 27-year-old songwriter navigates the dead ends, cheap promises and false starts of young adulthood. One minute, she’s stomping on the fading embers of a failed fling; the next, she’s pining for those very memories she just so happily surrendered. Glaspy toys with these emotional contradictions, juxtaposing nostalgia and angst against one another from song to song. As she puts it: “Why remember all the times I took forever to forget?”
That line is from “Memory Street,” the album’s centerpiece which finds Glaspy tiptoeing her way through remembrances of a failed relationship she’s worked hard to get over set to a slow-burning Neil Young & Crazy Horse groove. “When I get hungry for the mess we made,” she sings, indulging the cruel thrill and fulfillment in revisiting painful memories and past traumas, “I start walking down memory lane.” Whereas many songwriters might revel in the youthful abandon of such recklessness, Emotions and Math instead treats bad decisions and destructive impulses with compassionate clarity and heartfelt empathy. When Margaret Glaspy sings that she’s “a woman actin’ like a kid,” she presents the line not as critique but as consolation: it happens to the best of us.
