Rumer - Nashville Tears - 2 x Vinyl LPs

2020 release. 2 x Vinyl LPs

Southern American folklore tells of song-catchers: individuals who possess a spiritual, almost supernatural, connection to the music of a culture. They gather important songs and preserve them, providing voices to give them life and ensuring they’re remembered.

Rumer is such a song-catcher. Songs written by the British singer, like “Slow” and “Aretha,” made her a worldwide million-seller but she also has an unerring instinct for the work of others. On Nashville Tears, Rumer immerses herself in the catalog of Hugh Prestwood, a songwriter whose name is spoken with reverence by his colleagues. An album to savor, Nashville Tears collects fifteen of Prestwood’s finest songs, many never recorded until now, revealing truths of the heart, both intimate and universal, realistic and romantic.

Having tackled the songbook of Bacharach & David on 2016’s This Girl’s in Love, British pop-soul singer/songwriter Rumer released some of the finest songs of Nashville legend Hugh Prestwood on this, her fifth album and debut for Cooking Vinyl. A fine interpreter, she digs into the heart of each song to discover its essence, as on the haunting first single “Bristlecone Pine.”

John D. Buchanan