Not so long ago, Hannah Frances’ dazzling voice often got lost in the sounds around it. At the start of 2018’s White Buffalo, a fingerpicked acoustic guitar was enough to swallow her poignant opening words about the ways that time steals our chances to love. Frances was still new to her 20s, a recent art school dropout who had decamped to New York a year after her father died of a heart attack. The songs soon emptied out of her, three records’ worth in a little more than a year. As she lurked beneath the layers, she seemed to be hiding as much from herself as from the listener, trying to untangle a knot of woes in the private recesses of a quiet song. There were still traces of this during 2021’s very good Bedrock, her relatively loud and full-band contemplation of how to find redemption amid life’s wreckage. She would disappear behind the music, as if she still needed the space to sort these things out for herself.
There are no such retreats on Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances’ epiphanic fifth album but the first in which she fully grapples with what is possible when we finally step out of grief and into the rest of our lives. Her voice—a commanding alto one moment and a swan-diving soprano the next, often multi-tracked to give her words the credence of gospel—remains always at the fore, leading a compact band that can be as quiet as a creek or as rapturous as a waterfall. A triumph of perseverance, of trying to live alongside your fear rather than always underneath it, Keeper of the Shepherd has the inexorable energy of an auspicious debut, a set of songs that have simply been waiting to spring forth. Imagine if the love-riven Sharon Van Etten of Epic and Tramp had retreated, as Frances has, to the maple woods of Vermont rather than the concrete wilds of Los Angeles; it might sound a lot like the mighty Keeper of the Shepherd.
Many years ago, Frances found that the alternate guitar tunings that Joni Mitchell used enhanced her relationship with the instrument, augmenting her intuitive connection with its strings. Her work lingered in that gilded folk space for years, and she occasionally returns to it in these seven songs. With its big, open chords and subtly bent notes galloping beneath her, “Floodplain” feels a little like Mitchell and John Fahey sitting beside a campfire during a springtime road trip through the American Southwest. The long, interwoven phrases of “Woolgathering” suggest some unused Hejira skeleton, as if Mitchell never found the proper riposte to stick inside its graceful lope.
But for much of Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances’ intuitive instrumental patterns are only springboards for uncanny song structures, methodically built by Frances and producer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland. There is more than a touch of genteel prog around its folk core, situating Frances somewhere among Joanna Newsom, Jeff Buckley, and Fleet Foxes. Opener “Bronwyn” rises and falls, jerks and jumps as if on some ramshackle carousel, always about to slip into hell or ascend into heaven. Tangled wisps of saxophone curl around the dub-like strut of closer “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave,” all of it blurring into a paisley dream after a brief cool-jazz interlude. Frances suffered a bout of writer’s block before these songs arrived in a rush; their scope and flexibility are gifts of endurance, of sticking with it.
That lesson is written into every song here, as Frances contends with the long grip of grief and her belief that it will steadily loosen. Frances returns to a small set of images—caves, shepherds and their sheep, ribs and rivers—repeatedly across these 37 minutes, allowing her to make a map of her own progress. In “Bronwyn,” it’s loss that rips through her chest, expanding her rib cage until her body warps like the distorted drums beneath her; two songs later, in “Woolgathering,” she is breathing in a new love and life. “Give me time to free my lungs,” she sings, like Vashti Bunyan in an electrostatic haze, “the ribs are loosening.” Frances says she often sequences her albums in the order in which she wrote the songs; witness her inching forward into her own life.
Frances might come across like some precious emissary of sylvan New Age yuppiedom, trapped somewhere between a favorite yoga studio in town and a preferred farmstand in the country. She is, after all, a self-described “movement artist” who makes earnest music videos amid lush evergreen landscapes and does interpretive dance to her own songs in the near-dark on the Olympic Peninsula. “As my writing is inextricable from my kinship with the land,” she wrote recently in her newsletter, “I weave ecological imagery and archetype to recount my personal mythology more expansively, more richly.”
Yes, that reads like a lot, but it’s also true: Frances’ songs betray a genuine rootedness in the world around her, an understanding that loss can lead to growth if given enough space and time. This is the most natural cycle on the planet. “Floodplain” wonders what it’s like to have your past washed away like debris on a riverbank, “Vacant Intimacies” to find a shelter that actually gives back. These are things Frances has seen, felt, internalized, and now sung. At the end of “Husk,” after she has pondered the toggle between life and loss for four steadily intensifying minutes, the taut strings and harmonies fall away, leaving her voice unencumbered at last. “Death is a husk,” she offers with unqualified clarity. “Holding the shape of my life.” Keeper of the Shepherd is an arrival, not only of a transfixing singer-songwriter who has made a stunning record but also of a person realizing they are more than the pain of their past.
