MELISSA GIBSON
Welcome To Stay (Java Joe's Records)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

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Melissa Gibson is, she tells me, a singer/songwriter out of Nashville, Tennessee. That makes her probability of achieving success about the same as, well, as a music reviewer on the internet. She's undertaken a near impossible task in one of the world's most brutally competitive markets. A couple spins through her second solo release, Welcome To Stay, though, are enough to make me a believer. Melissa Gibson's got the goods, folks.

As a singer, she has a straightforward style that reflects her self-acknowledged major influence, Mary Chapin Carpenter. Her voice is just downhome enough to sell the country-tinged material, but her approach, and her material, is essentially on the contemporary folk side of the singer/songwriter school of pop music.

It's as a songwriter that Gibson really shines, though. This disc is an A&R man's dream. There's not a label around that doesn't have a stable full of fine singers in search of fine songs, and there are fine songs to spare on Welcome To Stay. They're the kind of songs you want to play over and over so you can learn the words and sing along, because she tells the kinds of stories that touch just about everybody's life in some way. Melissa Gibson writes "I wish I'd said that!" songs, which are the very best kind of all, and she writes them very well.

She writes them so well, in fact, that you're likely to hear the songs before you hear the singer, unless you do the smart thing and hear her tell her stories in the first-person by tracking down your own copy of Welcome To Stay.

Track List:

Miles To Go * Welcome To Stay * No Room For Blue * Even For You * Table For Two * Smoke And Mirrors * Shade * OK By Me * The Right Road * The Journey * Too Far Away * As You Leave * Turn Back Now * These Woods * Sleep Well Tonight

© 2003 - Shaun Dale