BELLOWS FALLS — “Turn it all upside down,” Zoe Muth sings on the opening track of her third full-length album, “World of Strangers.” “See the stars when we're looking at the ground, shining all around.”
Muth will appear at a special concert at Readmore Bed & Breakfast Inn in Bellows Falls on Sunday, Nov. 30, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The event is presented by Vermont Festivals.
In her new album, Muth presents 10 heartrending tales of the leaving and the left behind in her trademark style, infusing moments of despair with hope and levity.
This time around, she's made some changes, channeling a wider array of influences ranging from classic country ballads to early folk-rock.
Making her name in the Pacific Northwest, and heralded as one of the best songwriters to come out of Washington State, Muth has spent the past three years touring the United States and Europe.
Playing bars and cafés as a young pre-school teacher, she saved her minimum-wage earnings and beer bucket tips to pay for her 2009 debut album, “Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers.”
That album, along with her 2011 followup “Starlight Hotel,” garnered praise from the international press, and landed on No Depression's “Top 50 Albums” list in their respective years.
You'd hear many of her songs in any music hall, but Muth's grandest departure from her earlier sound can be heard in the decidedly un-honky-tonk “Annabelle,” where the conversation among cello, piano, and violin are subtly underscored with indie organ effects that twinkle like electric stars.
With a voice unadorned and almost conversational, Muth makes the every day more clear and compelling. She asks in song: “I don't want to die where the sleeping dogs lie, and the silence is stronger than stone. If I have to wander, through the lightning and the thunder, must I always go alone?”