Tara Jane O’Neil: The Cool Cloud of Okayness

Louisville-bred singer-songwriter Tara Jane O’Neil went solo at the dawn of our fine, new millennium. Her Peregrine LP hit streets and record-store shelves in 2000 via Corey Rusk’s Quarterstick Records — which had released the first and only LP by Rodan, the highly influential post-rock in which O’Neil played bass, just six years earlier.

Peregrine, its 10 songs now nearly hitting the 25-year mark, was pretty solid, though stylistically not a dramatic stretch of the imagination for fans of O’Neil’s other excellent musical projects. (Not so incidentally, two past collaborators — Retsin’s Cynthia Nelson and The Sonora Pine’s Samara Lubelski — both appeared on the first O’Neil LP.) A second LP, In The Sun Lines followed a year later. A third, Music for a Meteor Shower was released a year after that. By 2004, when O’Neil released You Sound, Reflect, she had four solid solo LPs under her belt – but her “sound” had remained fairly planted on terra firma. “Love Song Long,” one of the best songs on You Sound, Reflect, is a gem of a song, but its interwoven, river-like guitars descend right from Rodan’s “Bible Silver Corner” or, maybe even moreso, Sonora Pine’s II.

On April 26, Orindal Records released O’Neil’s latest LP, The Cool Cloud of Okayness, her first song-oriented affair since a self-titled LP on Gnomonsong Records in 2017, seven long years ago. (In the interim, we liked “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” the 2-song, covid-era single she released with Marisa Anderson in 2020. Her faux-80s experiment Songs for Peacock? Not as much. The new record is great stuff and longtime fans will lust to debate its merits in comparison to the rest of O’Neil’s catalog. But the parts of it that sometimes border on the breathtaking are those that illustrate just how developed O’Neil’s voice has become — separate from her past work, especially in strains of 90s- and 00s-era post-rock.

The Cool Cloud of Okayness wastes little time getting to its thesis. The title track, clocking in at just 2:33, is a riveting, almost jaw-droppingly-good ballad complete with undistorted and supple jazz guitar. There’s still that sense of floating in the ether that much of O’Neil’s best work elicits. But the idiom is wholly separate from past outings. When she sings “A cool cloud of okayness covered us for a season/ then a strange wind blew a strange day” or the track’s closing mantra – “May our cool cloud of okayness rain on we” – O’Neil sounds practically like a chanteuse, whose fragility is devastating and, yes, addictive.

The whole record, though, is no attempt at capturing the glow of Billie Holiday. O’Neil keeps things fresh and keeps them moving. “A Dash,” which we’d beg to hear more of than its 44 seconds, is a clattery blues number, with at least one guitar sort of mysteriously wailing in the background. Tracks like “Glass Island,” at 5:41 one of the LP’s longest tracks, are driven forward by O’Neil’s familiar bass figures — a staple of her work and one worth revisiting. “Seeing Glass” illustrates O’Neil’s adeptness at layering fluid-like guitar and bass, again, another lesson from post-rock. But, yes, O’Neil harbors a lot of surprises here. Some songs’ structures are looser, allowing for room for O’Neil to toy with textures (the excellent “Fresh End”). Others are wondrous and unexpectedly tight – say “Curling,” whose almost-funky percussion and throbbing bass hint at dubstep.

As O’Neil has gotten further and further removed from her band years and fully embraced her role as a solo singer-songwriter, she’s grown by leaps and bounds. Anyone who’s heard the rich atmosphere she conjured on her 2017 LP knows that. But there’s something pleasantly unexpected about The Cool Cloud of Okayness. Yes, it continues the adventurous path O’Neil has cut for the last 10 years. But – again, like her self-titled LP – it stands strong and distinct from her previous work. Someone listening to Peregrine 24 years ago likely would never have imagined O’Neil would sing like this. Now, we say, let’s bring on more of it.