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Romantic tribulations also underpin the equally blues boogie chugging shuffle of Small Town Nashville Blues, Jake Friel on harmonica, about shaking off her pisspoor partners’ problems and complications (“ leave them at the door”), and their broken promises, adopting a pragmatic stance of “ If I lose, let me lose” and curing the blues by buying a new pair of shoes (“ If it did the trick for Elvis, might do it for me too”).

Mostly, however, the perspective is turned inward, describing or drawing on her own experiences, such as on the riffing resonator Southern slide blues How You Doin’, a playful exploration of an early casual relationship and the shifting sands confusion resulting from her “ boyish man” being invested one moment and not the next (“ tell me what you doing/I wanna come on over and do it with you/Tell me you aint leavin, you must have your reasons/You’re making it too hard for me to get ya”), cautioning that she too may “disappear without a warning”. There’s a similar musical setting for the banjo-driven River Roll featuring Bronwyn Keith-Hines on fiddle, an echo-themed number about human interference with nature resulting in climate disaster and a time when, after constantly filling the lake with iron and rust, the river will say enough is enough.

It’s back to mountain music for Oxbow Meander Loop, written as a double banjo tune with Kyle Tuttle on baritone, the title deriving from how rivers sometimes divide into two consecutive loops pointing in opposite transverse directions before returning to the original course (the metaphor’s pretty obvious- “ All the things we might have been/They come, and then they go”) with Billy Contreras adding fiddle solo. But then Sometimes Baby gets into a bluesy rhythmic lope with punchier drums as she muses on the life of being a travelling musician with its feeling of freedom offset by the loneliness of the endless road when “ you can’t get away from yourself” but that “ Hard times well they will come and go/Your intention will someday show”. That said, the opening title track does chart an Appalachian-coloured slide picking path with a steady muted drum thump on a track that clearly lays out a personal mission statement about “giving up on giving in”. For Cristina Vane‘s follow up to 2021’s Nowhere Feels Lovely, she opted to delve deeper into her Delta blues, and rockier influences rather than its predecessor’s often Americana flavours.