Haley Bonar’s whiskey-flask folk is all about big dreams and bigger skies. The 20-year-old South Dakota native’s pastoral musings are rural and restless. “I can’t settle down for shit,” she testifies on . . . The Size of Planets, her debut — a dusky drinking album that’ll make you weak in the knees and the liver. Bonar’s voice is delicate, demanding, and as sun-kissed as her freckled face. “Don’t tell me about your picket fence, your darling, loving wife,” she implores on “Out of the Lake.” “Please just give me a glass of red wine and a six-steel-string guitar/If you want to preach the good life, meet me at the bar.”
Cleveland’s Brian Straw shares Bonar’s affinity for bucolic blues. He’s been fleshing out his free-range ruminations with Kent’s Six Parts Seven lately, and the early results are stunning: Straw’s voice, which quivers like an infant’s upper lip, is enlivened by piano and chimes, creating fresh new sounds with as much depth as the emotions that spawned them.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2004.