Carrot Top Records
2006
Let Your Ghost Go
About This Album
Even though Megan Reilly's second album, Let Your Ghost Go, was recorded in New York City, it's clear that the singer is much more connected and inspired by her Memphis roots than by what her new northern home has to offer her. Strummed acoustic chords and slide guitars dominate the record and act as the perfect backdrop to Reilly's airy, sometimes quavering voice. But that shakiness is just a technique she uses when she wants to accent the emotion of the music, like in the title cut, a kind of love song, in which Reilly sports a vibrato that would make Dolly Parton proud. Though she generally chooses to exercise her soft, gentle Tennessee twang in most of the tracks, when she wants to -- or needs to -- Reilly can project strength as well as any of her louder contemporaries. In the most rock-oriented piece on the record, "Tropic of Cancer," her voice has a subtle force that propels the song more than the bass-heavy drums do, and as she sings "Well, I said yeah, a good man is hard to find," quoting a line from author Flannery O'Connor, there's a sense of forlornness, despair, and wisdom that's almost chilling. That feeling of dark melancholy pervades the entire album, even during the more cheerful songs, as if Reilly is not convinced that happiness could actually exist, or at least she's hesitant to admit it.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7)

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