Anxious.Happy.Chill is Nashville-based singer-songwriter Elise Davis’ third album in six years. It’s a major leap forward musically and thematically than her two previous efforts. In fact, there’s some inherent satisfaction in this writer’s closing words to the review of 2018’s Cactus – “She’s an honest, evolving songwriter that just keeps improving.” This effort shows more than just incremental evolution; it is a transformation in several aspects. Last time out her songs straddled alt.-country and stripped-down folk, allowing Davis to speak confidently about independence, liberation, resilience, and self-sufficiency, casting herself as an independent woman who stands tall amidst whatever challenges come her way. Now her sound is positioned halfway between the confessional storytelling of alt-country and the bounce of pop/rock, as sturdy guitar-driven rockers mix with surprisingly lushly layered love songs. Yes, love songs, as the album was written during the bliss of a new relationship and recorded weeks after her wedding.
Davis’ previous themes — heartache, sadness, and independent stoicism, have been replaced with a bolder and brighter vision, despite the darkness that enshrouded the recording sessions. Days after wrapping up her honeymoon in Arizona, where she finished writing the album in the Sonoran Desert outside Tucson, Davis headed to producer Teddy Morgan’s studio in Nashville. COVID was already in full swing, forcing Davis and Morgan to work together for a month while maintaining their physical distance, communicating through the glass windows of the studio’s isolation booths and playing multiple instruments. Drummer Fred Eltringham (Sheryl Crow, the Wallflowers) joined them for a single day to while Morgan juggled bass, keyboard, and lead guitar. Meanwhile, Davis, usually an acoustic guitar strummer, went electric, adding grungy grit and a brasher attitude to songs like “Ladybug” (the album’s opener) and “Thirty.”
The album does have some balance. “Honeymoon,” has a retro, 1960s-influenced intro that unfolds into a driving love song, and “Flame Color,” a beautifully flowing song about yearning for love, features vocal harmonies from Davis’ husband. Between the power chords of “The Grid,” Davis dreams about unplugging herself from social media and learning “what it feels like for someone to not be able to get ahold of me.” On the punchy “Summertime,” which evolves into an ethereal kind of sound, she lets the worries of wintertime slip away into a haze of reverb. “Waves,” (pardon the pun) has her vocal confidently floating above a dense melodic soundscape. She seemingly sums up the span of her three albums in one fell swoop on “Another Year,” reflecting on her past, to make peace with the realities of the present, as if to connote that one shouldn’t oneself too seriously – an attitude we could not have foreseen based on the previous two recordings.
Half of the album contains songs already released as singles. “Ladybug,” “The Grid,” and “Flame Color” were all released last year. This year has “Yellow Bed’ and the stripped-down standout “Empty Rooms” which beautifully showcases her crystalline vocal, as she sings about rooms, whether they be offices, homes, or music venues once full, now empty.
So, thankfully, there’s a symmetry to her comment on this project and this writer’s observation about her last one, stated in the opening. “This album is about love, success/failure, dislike of social media, aging, summertime, and most importantly, it’s honest.” We would expect nothing less – a transformation lyrically, musically, and attitudinally but with that one important constant. This new chapter for Davis feels refreshing.
