Album Notes

Holly Miranda is a Detroit born musician, raised between Michigan and Tennessee. Miranda has been a one woman Banda for the past five years, touring the East coast and Midwest United States. Besides being trained in piano, Holly is a self-taught guitar and trumpet player. In 2001, She recorded "High Above The City", a 20-track solo album available online (hollymiranda. com) and at shows. The fall of 2003, Holly met and teamed up with Alex Lipsen, producer and keys player, The project evolved into 'The Jealous Girlfriends', a four piece band based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The record will be released in the spring of 2005, and a national tour will follow in the summer.
To hear samples from the album go to

www.thejealousgirlfriends.com


Bluetint Magazine Cd Review of High Above the City-

"This is not a casual listen. This is a CD that requires a serious investment of an evening, and I do mean an evening. These tunes deal with the most dark and intimate details of love, life, and the city. To say merely that the songs of Holly Miranda's "High Above The City" are sung from the heart would be understatement bordering on insult. Miranda's skillful union of her guitar and her voice results in an emotional outburst that makes it abundantly clear to all that she passionately believes every word she sings. Her anger and her tenderness come through with each strum of the guitar, with each push of her voice. This is not just sung from the heart -- it is the heart speaking.

This union of her voice and guitar comes across as a single sound. Whether she's strumming or picking her guitar, the merging of the two is remarkable in its power. It's as if you are there in the room with her as she spills out her guts to you. At times there seems to be almost a stream-of-consciousness construction to her songs, but close attention reveals some very-well structured songs. This is not Joni Mitchell at her most unstructured; this is more like Tracy Chapman at her best, precise and straightforward, angry and passionate. Not that she sounds all that much like either of these two great folk artists. Instead, Miranda's sound is more reminiscent of Ani Defranco, maybe a bit like Kate Bush.

What I appreciate most about this CD is its honesty. The title track is not just about her music career, it is also a look at her life, the insignificance of that life, and how weary she is of that life. Truth rings out when she sings lines like "it's like i'm flipping them over exposing them like cards in a game/but mostly when i lay them down, they all look the same/and everything is so quiet, and everything is so still/and i wonder how much longer i can do this/cause i'm losing my will." And the way she belts out these lines makes it so believable and moving.

Her voice can be very hypnotic, even if it does take some getting used to when she pushes it into her upper register. She uses all the textures of her voice to create a fullness of sound rarely achieved by a lone singer accompanied almost exclusively by her own guitar, a sound rich enough to make you forget about the absence of backing instruments. There may come a day when she decides to add other instruments to her sound; Miranda's use of her voice as a musical instrument is richly dynamic, but I can't help but wonder what her songs might sound like if she added perhaps a piano, cello, flute, or violin to the mix.

Don't get me wrong -- as she writes and performs her music today, Miranda gives you everything she's got. To add other instruments might tend to distract from the intimacy of her songs and the urgency of her delivery. However, with her musical training in piano and her inarguable skill in song-writing, I believe that any instruments she might choose to add would result in a sound I would be very interested in hearing.

Whatever musical direction she chooses, I hope Miranda maintains her current penchant for writing lyrics that manage to be simultaneously simple yet insightful, lyrics which are clear and comprehensible. This isn't to say that just because her lyrics are simple and straightforward that they are in any way less moving and meaningful. Quite the opposite. Both subjectively and objectively, her meanings are communicated with urgency and power, a process helped immensely by her creative use of repetition to underscore her primary themes.

Overall, this is a CD that should be purchased and listened to by anyone who has been in love, anyone who has been hurt by a friend, anyone who is trying to cope with the hardships of city life. Miranda's greatest strengths are in her understanding of relationships and in her ability to convey that understanding with her voice and guitar, the truly classic hallmarks of the folk artist."

David B
Bluetint Magazine