I now have to acknowledge that the songwriter responsible for ‘I Hope’ and ‘The Good Ones’ actually has some talent. I have some conflicting emotions about this. For however much I’d love to cherry pick this album’s bad moments, put them on display for you all, and use them as a cheap excuse to slate Chapter & Verse in its entirety, I can’t in good conscious do that. I don’t want to oversell this, indeed I think the album is only barely passable, but the fact that it broke through all my in built bias against Gabby Barrett does deserve some acknowledgement, and the album is indeed decent.
What caught me off guard the most is the amount of organic country flare the album has. The prominent fiddle on ‘Cowboy Back’is very welcome, as is the pedal steel on the opener ‘The Chapter’, although that song is ruined by the bulky, overmixed percussion that runs rampant though the entire album. The grooveless lumpy mess of ‘Glory Days’ and the particularly stiff ‘Off The Highway’ (way to squander a decent sounding mandolin) all stand out as moments where the drum mixing really lets Gabby Barrett down as these songs could have been more than salvageable otherwise.
This would be the point where I would get out my pitchfork and dismantle the songwriting on this album, exposing Gabby Barrett as the painfully limited songwriter I once thought her to be, but not only did I find genuine moments of promise in the writing on this album, there’s also just enough of a thematic core to hold it all together. The album focusses mostly on Gabby Barrett’s journey as a mother as well as everything she did to get her to this point. It’s a simple concept, but moments like the little details about the places she left behind on ‘Had It All’, the raw ‘Growing Up Raising You’ that shows her embarking on that journey, and the love song ‘All Of My Love’ that has her laying her imperfections bare, all add to the dramatic stakes of an album that could have probably just coasted on sentimentality, but chooses not to. Or maybe I just like it because Gabby Barrett is only 23, so her singing about motherhood so young makes it feel more raw than it probably is.
To be sure, there is still plenty about the songwriting that deserves critique, mostly when the album defaults to hollow thought experiments rather than focussing on her unique story. ‘Jesus On A Train’ has her contemplating all the things she might do should she met Jesus in the real world, but given that the scenarios are merely hypothetical, the song comes across less like she’s questioning her faith and more like she’s just jerking off to how much she loves Jesus. It’s a similar case on ‘Hard To Read’, a song about how a partner being emotionally withdrawn might create difficult situations that would need to be overcame in a relationship, but once again its just fantasising about that as a possibility rather than engaging in anything that’s playing out in reality. It’s the ‘I Hope’ problem all over again, although less egregious this time around.
Chapter & Verse ultimately leaves me way more conflicted than I would have ever expected. On the one hand, Gabby Barrett has shown herself as more than capable of making some very decent music, but on the other, this is an album that does get in its own way one too many times to call it any more than passable. Still, for Gabby Barrett, this is a step in the right direction. I’m by no means a fan, but I think I’ve finally made my peace.
