Amateur

Anyone remotely familiar with Garrison Starr might wonder why she named her seventh studio album Amateur. But the base definition of that word reads: “A person who engages in an activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit.” So the title is an admirable admission that the only thing Starr wants from music is music. From the first chorus of the opening song, “Keep Your Head Down,” it’s easy to believe her. This isn’t the sound of an overambitious songstress pining for a commercial radio hit. She blends folk, pop, indie rock, and a honed singer/songwriter’s talent for crafting moving music. She inflects like a young Emmylou Harris in the autobiographical “To Garrison, on Her 29th Birthday,” a soaring, moving track that has more in common with the distorted guitar crunch of '90s indie rock than country or Americana. But she returns to her rootsy beginnings in “The Train That’s Bound for Glory,” an original tune musing on her grandparents. It sounds so timeless and classic that it'd be easy to mistake it for an old public domain standard.