Sahara Smith

Myth of the Heart (Playing in Traffic)

By Sarah Grant
Published: September 2nd, 2010 | 7:00am

Sahara Smith’s debut album plays like the diary of a front-porch crooner sharing her heartache under the setting southern sun. Myth of the Heart is clean, simply structured, and unpretentious, with the title track and “All I Need” playing as effortlessly as the summer breeze in which Smith probably wrote them. A gentle piano line over a walking bass is the syrup that makes her doughy falsetto go down nice and easy, while “Angel” glides on astral strings and plunges into Jewel-esque vocals, but “Mermaid” is the clear standout.

The quiet desperation of “Mermaid” is carried by Smith’s voice, which bends and blushes around violin strings with the finesse of a mythical creature. The song is about how time takes no pity on the heartbroken and everything is “growing fast and growing deep.” Intentional or not, Smith invokes James Joyce, the patron saint of hopelessness, by citing “an old hotel in Dublin / Growing heavy in Irish rain.” The cruel mixture of desire and impossibility bleeds on this song as if from an open wound, and when Smith sings “I’m happy for you,” don’t believe her.

When she lets her voice down from the ledge, things get spicy. The lone come-hither track, aptly titled “The Real Thing,” is where Smith trades in lace for leather, Jewel’s holiness for Bonnie Raitt’s grit, and gets her voice down deep where it counts: “I got this crazy idea and it’s growling at the surface.”

Myth of the Heart makes no secret that Smith’s heart has four wheels, as she intones “I wanna drive all night long and become another person / Until nothing is for certain,” but she still has to find the right keys. However, with the songwriting chops and mature vocals she has already shown, there’s no doubt she’ll be rolling the windows down and cruising across an endless stretch of land to a place four leaf clovers don’t grow.

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Sahara Smith MySpace page

Playing in Traffic Records