“I don’t like Robert Johnson,” Holland says, “but I’ve got an awesome live recording of [singer-songwriter] Entrance doing “Love In Vain.” His version goes, “When the train left the station, there were two lights on behind/the blue light was the blues and the red light was my mind/is all my love in vain?”

It’s a nice coincidence, then, that when writing notes on her third album, Springtime Can Kill You, Holland was on a train. What she wrote, in fact (her aversion to Johnson aside), is as unvarnished and poetic as that song. As well, it’s a consummately eloquent sketch of the record and through-line for this bio.
She writes: This baby is the picture of a lovesick, convoluted mind. Sometimes my voice is as a lusty young woman, sometimes an adoring friend, sometimes a tormented soul, sometimes a whispering ghost... Echoes of Memphis Minnie’s “Homesick Blues,” of Freakwater’s “My Old Drunk Friend,” Jimmie Rodgers pining for love. This is a pilgrim’s progress through the haunted season of lust.

Holland’s sepia-toned song noir and billowy voice are in rare form as she weaves ethereal tales at a crossroads where haunting meets joyful—hers is a voice from the heavens singing stories of the underworld. The songs rise and fall like heavy eyelids and convey the peace of a place between asleep and awake. Sounds from past and present-tense waltz together to a never-ending melody that flickers between folk, jazz, blues and pop as Holland’s characters and situations play on surrealistic celluloid.

“Springtime Can Kill You” is the sum of those songs, blending bliss, lust and torment into a creepy-beautiful, Jarmuschian reverie. Holland, singing as if deceased, warns there’s no time to smell the roses (“you don’t have the time for the least hesitation”). Though existential at first blush, it’s a coy, sultry, spectral, even baleful tune where death is a metaphor for the black aftermath of rent love. “It’s just about being fucked-up, heartbroken and burnt,” says Holland.

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Crush In The Ghetto
2. Mehitibell's Blues
3. Springtime Can Kill You
4. Crazy Dreams
5. You're Not Satisfied
6. Stubborn Beast
7. Don't Tell 'Em
8. Moonshiner
9. Ghostly Girl
10. Nothing Left To Do But Dream
11. Adieu False Heart
12. Mexican Blue