NICOLETTE GOOD
Monarch
www.nicolettegood.com

San Antonio’s Nicolette Good is certainly having a namesake year. You know, a good one. She’s won the Texas singer-songwriter’s equivalent of an Oscar and an Emmy, earning Kerrville’s prestigious New Folk Winner status on the heels of snagging honors at Dallas’ Wildflower Performing Songwriter competition — to say nothing of being one of the dozens of Texas musicians featured on Texas Troubador, that little ol’ show where Glee meets Gruene Hall. And to top it all off, she’s just released her full-length debut, Monarch, and it’s a beauty. Like fellow San Antonian, Edith Frost, Good trades in eerily blissful vocals and mature songs whose atmospheric gestalt lure you in upon first listen and then shock and unsettle upon further lyrical dissection. Good is a poet of the first order, as revealed on the mosaic “Marathon,” a resigned and forlorn West Texas breeze of self-examination (“I am a woman, hot-blooded and bored in the moonlight, hanging on your every word”), and the title track, about a mysterious pauper patron of her art. The diabolical “Pretty Clementine” reveals Good cavalierly getting away with it 49er-style in an intensely drawn character sketch, and “Call Me” finds her issuing half-hearted drunken ultimatums to a lover on the other end of a payphone line. And on “The Road,” we hear Good at her best, enveloping the longing to roam with divine understanding and a sweet music-box melody: “And I said, ‘Baby, just remember that the man upstairs can hear your lies,’ and he said, ‘Darling, I think the man upstairs will sympathize.’”) Good is an insightful and unsympathetic observer of the world she sees around her … and imagines for us. Good stuff. — D.C. BLOOM