Alonetone Features: Oh My Goodness

Therese Workman is sitting across from me. She sips tea and her hair grows. Around the room are strewn instruments; she can pick them up and play if you ask her to.

There is a view from this apartment. The window looks out on new leaves, high above the street, that sway until I surprise them and assure them that there is no escape. This is New York, and we have outdone nature.

We have just come from the Galapagos Artspace in Brooklyn, where I've watched her perform then chased her to her home in the upper west side to get a listen to her new songs.

“I moved here from Sunnyside, where i was living in rent-controlled bliss, but all good things must come to an end,” she tells me.

But I cannot answer her. These are New York predicaments, which I do not understand.

She is 29 minus a few days, an accomplished pianist, bassist, guitarist, drummer, technician and a graduate of Harvard.

“The difference between story telling in music is just a matter of foot tapping. And words...you don’t always need words to tell a story.”

She eats a blackberry, averts her gaze, and presses play.

A piano line, high and tight, the kind that walks on your chest, again and again, like Tiny Little Babies (the name of the song) who look up at me now and again, to see if I am annoyed, is the mainstay of the track. But, at 1:30, as if in return for bearing with them, they show me where I have been led. What they show me (I can only assume) is what I’ve forgotten, the memory of some distant womb.

It is just a simple line of keys that come in like a blanket around the piano, soft enough to throw over my shoulders and just long enough to cover my freezing toes come night. It is warm here and I do not wish to leave.

The next few songs are playful.

On “Bubble Bath” she tries to hide her voice somewhere off to the right, behind a traveling piano and two layers of static - but it is too bright, too haunting, and on the chorus it leaps through and grabs me, only to snap me out of my revelry with the next verse calling “If you’re Asian, take a bath / If you’re naughty, take a bath.”

“I like humor,” Therese tells me. “It can be warm or dark and allows a freedom that being serious doesn’t really bend for.”

And none of these songs stand up straight. Even the melancholy tracks like “Selkie” or “Tiny Little Babies” come bearing drums that send the muscles into rhythmic twitches.

Her charms aren't hard to notice. Each song brings with it an accompaniment; minimal, but enough to accomplish what other artists fail to do with 17 tracks - suck me in, chill me out, treat me nice and send me home with a story.

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