Album by June Henry
At first, I thought Make Me Honest was a lo-fi indie folk album. Then I heard shades of Bright Eyes. Then the acoustic intensity of Ani DiFranco. Then psychedelic sounds. Then the hooks started sounding like power pop hiding somewhere underneath all of it.
Guitars are played with a fun, staccato intensity. Vocals are doubled and layered. Fuzz, effects and additional sounds appear unexpectedly. Songs that seem like they’re going to remain tiny can suddenly start expanding around you.
The title track demonstrates that almost immediately.
“Make Me Honest” begins with acoustic guitar and voice before effects and layers gradually enter. The vocals stretch and the music starts to feel almost elastic, folding itself around the melody until that simple beginning has become something vaguely psychedelic.
That escalation surrounds a much less comfortable realization: how little control you actually have over an attachment you’d rather leave behind.
That inability to completely separate yourself from the past runs throughout the album.
“Cloves” wraps fuzzy 90s lo-fi textures around another tightly constructed song. While looking back at a relationship that has ended and a life that has moved forward, I keep hearing someone missing that moment in time more than just the person they were with.
“Dead Things” makes that attachment considerably uglier. Slightly offset guitars and multitracked vocals make it sound like several June Henrys are surrounding one another while the lyrics dig into the past in an attempt to make the anger return.
Make Me Honest captures that idea that people don’t disappear from your life simply because you’ve decided they should. They leave roots behind. Old feelings get tangled with memories, identities and versions of yourself that no longer exist anywhere except inside you.
But this isn’t an album entirely trapped in the past.
The clipped acoustic guitar of “Creature Comforts” has an almost Violent Femmes quality, bringing humor and rhythm to a song that moves between the intensity of performing and the mundane reality waiting when the show is over.
The quickly strummed “Pretty to You” moves through the complicated space between how you see yourself, how the world sees you and how you want to be seen by someone who matters to you.
“Intertwining” has the acoustic intensity of Ani DiFranco. There’s little more than voice and guitar, but it feels enormous as the song confronts the fear of bringing old patterns into something new.
“What I Want” allows some genuine brightness to break through. It’s practically a sweet song about the rush of falling for someone who makes you feel seen after spending so much time searching for that connection. But Make Me Honest isn’t particularly interested in making even happiness feel simple.
The song begins with quick acoustic strumming and a beautiful vocal before more and more layers arrive. By the end, the whole thing is nearly spinning out of control.
“Twenty Days on Different Planets” might be the album’s clearest demonstration that these little recordings contain genuinely big pop songs. The guitar is immediately catchy, the melody feels enormous and the arrangement keeps lifting until it reaches a gorgeous crescendo.
The lyrics are considerably harder to untangle, but they return to the past and the strange power it can retain. There are things that still hurt and memories that continue doing their work, but there’s also some comfort in knowing you can’t completely return to the person you once were.
Near the end, “Forgiveness” removes many of the album’s production tricks. It’s mostly acoustic guitar and voice, moving quickly but sounding remarkably pretty.
And something seems to be changing.
Earlier, “Dead Things” was deliberately dredging up old feelings to become angry again. “Forgiveness” begins to question why that anger needs to be preserved at all.
It would be easy to end there on this note of change. But Make Me Honest doesn’t. Instead, the album returns to where it started with “Make Me Honest Reprise.” It’s essentially the opening song again, except the escalation is gone. This time it’s acoustic, quiet and almost resigned.
Returning to the beginning seems to suggest that change isn’t a clean break between who you were and who you become. You can move forward while still looking backward. You can fall for someone new while fearing the patterns you’ve carried from someone old. You can stop wanting to be angry and discover the anger hasn’t completely disappeared.
And sometimes you can end up exactly where you started without being quite the same person who started there.
Make Me Honest packs all of that into less than half an hour, wrapping emotionally raw songwriting in acoustic guitars, lo-fi fuzz, power-pop hooks and arrangements that continually find ways to make small recordings feel enormous.
Verdict: Solid
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