I had given up hoping after fourteen years but Mary Margaret O'Hara has a new album out. 1988's breathtaking Miss America(which Virgin sat on for 4 years - "the label offered me all kinds of things if I wouldn't put it out because they said it was really bad") was followed by an EP of Christmas songs in 1991 but after that there's just been guest vocals, a couple of tracks on tribute albums and some legendary and weird live appearances. Apparently dealing with Virgin and intractable musicians was such a rotten experience that all the praise, raves and fanish devotion she's received since hasn't been able to lure her back into the recording studio for a second album.

Or so I thought.

Turns out that a new album sneaked out sometime earlier this year, the soundtrack to a film called Apartment Hunting in which she also plays a street busker. I'm a little worried about getting this, however. After so many year's anticipation will I be able to listen to it without falling prey to impossible expectations? Best to go back to that first album for the time being....

Miss America remains the post-Horses album to which - in my humble opinion - all female singer-songwriter ought to aspire, the companion piece to Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter. Over a deceptively smooth, seductively warm, yet sparce and mostly acoustic backing that mixes elements of country, jazz and torchsong, O'Hara seems to take her perfect, Patsy Cline voice for granted and challengers herself with the task of re-inventing singing from first principles. If that sounds silly then you haven't heard "Year in Song". There are moments where she sounds like she's channeling Monk (Thelonious that is, although you might find the influence of Meredith on some tracks) or even Derek Bailey, testing both the text and the instrument of her voice to see where they will go, although she never loses the over-riding shape of the song or descends into faux-Schoenbergian Sprechgesang or angst grrl yelping. No matter what she does with her voice, whether she's babbling in dervish-like idiolalia or teasing a note towards ethereal silence she never loses the essential melodic line. It's astonishing stuff, all done with such precision and conviction that you don't notice she's doing things that really ought to be unlistenable or just plain wrong unless you're taking notes. It's such a freakishly brilliant, one-off masterpiece that even after 12 years I'm still reduced to fanboy gibberish trying to write about it.

More on M2OH - as we gibbering fanboys call her - here:

The Uniquely Talented Mary Margaret O'Hara - Christopher Jones (SOCAN)

Mary Margaret O'Hara in Ecstasy - Kurt Wildermuth (Perfect Sound Forever)