My Buoy

Carsie Blanton gets her groove and goes Motown.

by M.J. Fine

SPLIT DECISION: "I thought I was gonna have to choose between a good boyfriend or writing songs."

[ rock/pop/soul ]

"If it's not going to make sense, then why are you saying it?" Carsie Blanton asks over summery sips at Mugshots in Fairmount. "Why not just write an instrumental piece?"

Writing instrumentals was never a serious option for Blanton, who grew up in Luray, Va., in a family of poets, songwriters and lyric geeks, and made her first album, 2005's Ain't So Green, while living in Eugene, Ore., with a house full of musicians. It was a sly, self-assured jazz-pop debut, easy to make and easy on the ears. But Blanton, who turns 24 on Wednesday, has higher hopes for her new disc, Buoy. She works a lot of words into her songs, but she wants you to savor every one.

After getting serious about pursuing a career as a musician, she moved to Philly — where her mother was living — started gigging relentlessly, and enlisted The Figgs' Pete Donnelly to produce her record. "I played him my little folky kind of pop songs, girl-with-guitar songs, and was like, 'I want this to be like a Motown record.' And he got it."

He sure did. "Money in the Bank," a bossa nova by birth, has a touch of The Jackson 5 about the chorus now. But there's more to Buoy than Berry Gordy hand-me-downs. "Two at a Time" is a sad, bewitching waltz; "Baby Can Dance" has a New Orleans party vibe; and the piano-based "Crazy for Love" carries a bit of Burt Bacharach's DNA. "It's rare that somebody has good lyrics and a groove, so I think if that is combined, I'm always really interested." Blanton says.

After making Ain't So Green as a lark, the follow-up took much longer and cost more than she was expecting. "When I made the first one, I wasn't a professional, so I didn't care that much if it came out or not," she says. "And a lot of the songs were old and I wasn't that attached to them."

But not long after she decided to go pro, Eros and Erato conspired to turn off the taps.

"You'll notice a lot of my songs are about unhappy relationships, 'cause I was in some unhappy relationships for a while," she explains. "And then I got in a happy relationship and I had a dry spell, of about a year, where I really didn't write any songs. ... I thought I was gonna have to choose between a good boyfriend or writing songs."

Luckily, she didn't have to choose. She pulled herself out of that rut with a rope of more words than even she needed — pages and pages of them.

"I started working on this lyric, which was just, 'brighter than a buoy,' and it was this idea that you can make up similes like that. So then when I realized I could do that, I just spat out this long string of similes, and that was the beginning of that song."

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Once she had her title track, a gentle shuffle that charts the course of a courtship, the rest flowed like a river. Her second album may not have come together as smoothly as her first, but its mood is more playful; where Ain't So Green tallies the cost of commitment, Buoy dallies with a bunch of boys. Though she has a beau, Blanton let past experiences seep into her lyrics.

The guy who inspired "Please" is married to someone else now; the one behind "Every Punch You Throw" was best left behind. And in "Baby Can Dance," Blanton sings of a social chameleon who went from geek to stud under certain conditions.

"I called my mom and I was like, 'I have this intense crush on this guy who's not attractive in any way, except when he's dancing,'" she recalls. Plenty of women would turn to their mother when faced with such a conundrum. But Blanton's blessed to have a mother who paid her dues in Nashville.

"My mom was like, 'Oh, yeah, I always thought it'd be funny if there was a song called 'Baby Can Dance,' that was just like a list of things that were annoying about your boyfriend, but he could dance, so it was OK.' And then I sat down and wrote that one."

Funny idea? Yep. Good lyrics? Check. Groovy? Aw, yeah.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Carsie Blanton with Devon Sproule, Fri., July 17, 8 p.m., $12, MilkBoy Coffee, 2 E. Lancaster Ave., Ardmore, 610-645-5269, milkboycoffee.com.