Kate Mann

Things Look Different When the Sun Goes Down (Orange Dress)

By Leah Urbom
Published: April 19th, 2009 | 9:00am

Kate Mann is of that rare breed who can sing mournful tales of love and loss — minus a pedestrian sense of desperation — and come away with all the perspective of a woman enlightened. Not simply sad and brooding, Mann’s newest release, Things Look Different When the Sun Goes Down, is a montage of solid Americana and well-placed fiddle with a thick southwestern flavor (not surprising, seeing as Mann grew up in the mountains of New Mexico).

This is the third album for the Portland, Oregon–based singer-songwriter; Mann was a high-school teacher until 2005 when she decided to pursue music full-time. She handed over her car in exchange for a van and refurbished her mother’s old ‘63 Gibson steel-string to begin singing her own mixture of blues bar twang and soulful acoustic balladry.

Things Look Different embarks on its swaggering and boisterous title track, which could be viewed as illusory with lines such as, “She prayed the Lord her soul to keep if she died before the morning / But the problem is she is not a believer / The lines they hand out in the church to give the fool his dollar’s worth / She always suspected were deceiving.” “Robert Johnson Knew” continues along the same path with its enjoyably cavalier harmonica and piquant lyrics. The album slows at this point to highlight more measured songs, most notably “Needles and Pins,” which swells with a sad confusion.

Even in its darkest moments, Things Look Different entails a sense of hopefulness, as on “Funny Thing,” when Mann notes, “If the water washes all your pictures away / You can draw them again.” Her painfully beautiful rendition of the traditional Mexican folk song, “La Llorona,” shames artists that take only half-assed stabs at foreign language tracks, and “In a Movie” is an earnest look at something doomed, “Like kings and queens we’d fare / With your fingers in my hair / Conducting electricity.”

Things Look Different tells stories of lessons learned and the great unknown. And though she may look back fondly on that dirty boy with the cigarette and the hollow words, things look different enough now that Mann knows to walk away from the movie fantasy and towards a more realistic horizon.

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