Something to Say

[December 15th, 2004] Singer-songwriters are a dime a dozen. Since every flunky with a six-string to play, a voice box to abuse and a coffee shop to fill with musical metaphor can become one, sometimes it seems like everyone has. So Corrina Repp can be excused for losing faith following the 2001 release of I Take on Your Days.

"After that record, I just stopped," the singer said during a chat on a recent Wednesday afternoon. "I didn't know what I could say that hundreds of other women with stinkin' guitars haven't already said."

Fair enough. But Repp, now 31, isn't just another face with a used guitar and a book full of poems. After three well-received albums, her deceptively simple songs had already assured her a place among the Pacific Northwest's top singer-songwriters. Despite winning critical attention, Repp stopped strumming, barely picking up her guitar throughout 2001 and 2002. But then she played a show at Berbati's Pan almost two years ago, and it was there that local producer Keith Schreiner caught her act.

"He claims he spent the next six months trying to find me and that he would see me at the burrito place and be too nervous to say hi," says Repp bashfully. "So finally a friend of a friend gave him my number, and he called and asked if I wanted to work on a song with him."

That one song grew into the 10 collected on It's Only the Future, Repp's fourth release on Hush Records. What sets it apart from her earlier work is that it's the product of collaboration. The result is an album that quietly, but convincingly, sets the husky-voiced musician ahead of the crowd she stepped away from almost four years ago. Much of the album's maturity is courtesy of Schreiner's meticulously crafted electro back-tracking. The backdrop challenges Repp's emotional, midrange ballads, providing both a dramatic tension and an energetic lightness. But the beauty of the album comes from the real-life experiences Repp brought to Schreiner's basement studio.

"The year that we recorded it, there were a lot of things shifting in my life," Repp says, referring to her recent separation from her husband of four years. "I definitely had things to say. It kind of seems that once I had a place for those feelings to go, the songs just started to happen."

On its own, the album feels like a conceptual work out of the sketchbook of Henrik Ibsen, a dark tale of a woman caught between obligation and the need to move on. The title track introduces that theme when Repp sings, with a plaintive sigh, "It's only the future/ And the fact that you left home/ No matter what you do you're alone."

The rest of the album follows in transfixing lockstep, but that line, with all the emotional weight Repp carries in the words, justifies her return to the stage and the studio. She might not be saying anything new, but she says it so well, with such experience in her voice, you'd be a fool not to listen.