Annie Keating’s “Tides” Ebbs and Flows Through Trying Times

The songs on Annie Keating‘s new album, Bristol County Tides, are about “finding human connection amidst times of isolation [and are] deeply personal to my own journey over the last year,” she tells Brooklyn Roads. She wrote them while spending most of 2020 at a cottage in Bristol County, Massachusetts, with her mom, about whom she sings on “Doris,” one of the 15-track album’s many standouts.

Annie Keating -Up On The Roof / photo by Ehud Lazin / courtesy of Sideways-Media

Bristol County Tides gets off to a rocking start with “3rd Street,” wherein we encounter some of the local denizens, followed by “Kindred Spirit,” the album’s first single release. In this song the singer meets someone whose travails and attitudes match her own. “I like the way my name rolls off your tongue,” Keating croons, adding, “Words may lie but your eyes tell me the truth.”

The de facto title tracks provide an intriguing contrast. “Blue Moon Tide” is the more upbeat tune about leaving behind “what I don’t need” while “getting stronger with each new stride.” On “High Tide” she sings of uncertain times in which “summer is just around the bend but it don’t mean a thing,” while seeking solace in driving “with music up loud.”

Annie Keating On The Stoop / photo by Ehud Lazin / courtesy of Sideways-Media

These songs bookend “Half Mast,” in which Keating skillfully sums up life during the pandemic, equating it with a hurricane that is “turning the world upside down.” She sings hopefully that “as things fall apart, we carry on,” but notes on the downside that there is “nowhere much to go.” There were good times as well, expressed in songs such as “Lucky 13” and “Hank’s Saloon,” while “Bittersweet” is her aptly titled eventual farewell to Bristol County.

Other highlights are such insightful relationship songs as “Kindness,” “Nobody Knows,” “Song for a Friend” and the album’s closer “Goodbye,” a wistful lament best captured by the refrain, “My feet are back on the ground though I sure do miss the sky.”

Recorded with a live band at Atomic Sound in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Bristol County Tides is Annie Keating’s most accomplished, inspired, and ambitious album to date.