Not so long ago, Hannah Frances’ dazzling voice often got lost in the sounds around it. At the start of 2018’s White Buffalo, a fingerpicked acoustic guitar was enough to swallow her poignant opening words about the ways that time steals our chances to love. Frances was still new to her 20s, a recent art school dropout who had decamped to New York a year after her father died of a heart attack. The songs soon emptied out of her, three records’ worth in a little more than a year. As she lurked beneath the layers, she seemed to be hiding as much from herself as from the listener, trying to untangle a knot of woes in the private recesses of a quiet song. There were still traces of this during 2021’s very good Bedrock, her relatively loud and full-band contemplation of how to find redemption amid life’s wreckage. She would disappear behind the music, as if she still needed the space to sort these things out for herself.
There are no such retreats on Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances’ epiphanic fifth album but the first in which she fully grapples with what is possible when we finally step out of grief and into the rest of our lives. Her voice—a commanding alto one moment and a swan-diving soprano the next, often multi-tracked to give her words the credence of gospel—remains always at the fore, leading a compact band that can be as quiet as a creek or as rapturous as a waterfall. A triumph of perseverance, of trying to live alongside your fear rather than always underneath it, Keeper of the Shepherd has the inexorable energy of an auspicious debut, a set of songs that have simply been waiting to spring forth. Imagine if the love-riven Sharon Van Etten of Epic and Tramp had retreated, as Frances has, to the maple woods of Vermont rather than the concrete wilds of Los Angeles; it might sound a lot like the mighty Keeper of the Shepherd.
Many years ago, Frances found that the alternate guitar tunings that Joni Mitchell used enhanced her relationship with the instrument, augmenting her intuitive connection with its strings. Her work lingered in that gilded folk space for years, and she occasionally returns to it in these seven songs. With its big, open chords and subtly bent notes galloping beneath her, “Floodplain” feels a little like Mitchell and John Fahey sitting beside a campfire during a springtime road trip through the American Southwest. The long, interwoven phrases of “Woolgathering” suggest some unused Hejira skeleton, as if Mitchell never found the proper riposte to stick inside its graceful lope.