On her second album, a country singer-songwriter accustomed to crafting songs for artists like Miranda Lambert and Lee Ann Womack finds her own voice.
Over years spent crafting material for others, songwriter Natalie Hemby has come to specialize in creating songs around thoughtful characters. Country music, happily, thrives on narrative. On Pins and Needles, the artist who earned a publishing contract barely out of her teens tackles her own tunes, songs that she might have written for clients/friends like Miranda Lambert and Little Big Town. Her second solo album benefits from her zen approach to singing: She won’t go beyond what her men and women feel. In a genre with a penchant for melodrama, Hemby has a novelist’s range and a short story writer’s concentration.
An imagist adept at supplying singers like Lee Ann Womack with vivid ideas (“The Bees” could be in a Songwriting for Dummies manual), Hemby has earned those royalties in the last decade. A rousing, blowzy number for Kelly Clarkson in “Don’t Rush”; songs about simple stuff like “Pink Sunglasses” and “Smoking Jacket,” among others, for Lambert; and delicate bubble-disco bops like “Velvet Elvis” and “Butterflies” for Kacey Musgraves—whether she’s writing alone or with a team, her material functions as scripts bereft of camera directions, as if aware the star will change things around. Hemby’s 2017 debut, Puxico, was the equivalent of an indie film whose makers had previously hobnobbed with George Clooney: tentative, conscious (if not self-conscious) of its smaller scale. Two years later, a project with Amanda Shires, Brandi Carlisle, and Maren Morris called the Highwomen allowed Hemby to blend with three exemplary vocalists and songwriters in an album-length demonstration of democracy at its most blithe.
Pins and Needles, assembled over several years with help from buddies including Lambert, Morris, and Brothers Osborne, captures a moment when an artist, calling in her chits, audibly blooms with the assurance of having found a voice after years of experimenting with others’. People making do without making a fuss is her subject; her women are wary, not weary. Occasionally Pins and Needles softens when the allure of her conceits is just about the only thing she’s got—for example, comparing a relationship’s chill to “Radio Silence,” or letting the dull syncopations, whistled hook, and redundant vocal filters on “Banshee” shrivel the track into something decidedly un-banshee-esque. Call it the complacency of metaphor. Hemby is best riding mid-tempo grooves like “New Madrid,” whose acoustic guitars chug at the pace of her recollections, and “Pinwheel,” a song heavily indebted to Sheryl Crow jams like “A Change Will Do You Good.” (In fact, Crow co-writer Jeff Trott had a hand in both.)
Hemby, married to producer Mike Wrucke, projects the self-confidence of an artist who understands how collaboration with equals rebounds to the credit of the top-billed person. She helped make Miranda Lambert into the last decade’s most dependable country act; Lambert and other pals are returning the favor. “I don’t wanna be a hero/Just wanna be a face in the crowd,” she announces in the first track, as if we needed reminding. Thanks to her understatement at the mic, the women in her songs feel too deeply to show those feelings. Reminiscing about days when she and a lover left clothes on the waterbank while she “breathed in” his kiss in “Lake Air,” Hemby gives each word its weight, as if the memory were a flower pressed between the pages of a favorite book. The bounty of Pins and Needles suggests she’s got plenty more tales to tell.
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