Barry Muir – She’s a Little Wildflower
Pastoral songcraft and contemporary minimalism are not the same aesthetic, no matter how many critics might suggest otherwise, and Barry Muir’s new single “She’s a Little Wildflower” will verify as much to anyone unsure of this statement’s accuracy. Rather than stripping out all of the rock-influenced charms that this song naturally has, we get much of the same passive harmonies and framework that bring Gentle’s title track, “Where the Warm Breezes Blow” and “Holding My Own” to life. As the star of its parent album, “She’s a Little Wildflower” is exactly the kind of taste-tester newcomers to this artist’s sound need to check out this March.
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The harmonies that shadow every lyrical emission in this track are sterling, and I think they set up the narrative’s climax quite superbly. You can’t accuse Muir of not getting every ounce of melodic gold out of this arrangement as possible, and I think that even without having to employ a larger backing band, he still sounds like he’s delivering something so much larger than life in comparison to what most of his peers would have done with this same song. He knows the ins and outs of his sound, and he isn’t about to appropriate them in a way unbefitting his longtime fans.
Barry Muir has a sizeable following in his native scene, and I think it’s poised to keep growing as long as he keeps up the good work he’s putting into singles like “She’s a Little Wildflower” and the complete tracklist of his new album Gentle. He’s a craftsman, and his desire to put as much detail into an act of expression puts him in a special category of singer/songwriters not nearly as populated as it was just a generation ago. I like Muir’s style, and I can really see it catching fire thanks to the success of this most recent content
