Norma MacDonald

On In Waves, Norma MacDonald explores new songwriting tactics, reimagines old demos, and conducts sound experimentations that expand her folk and country influences into 60s pop, Motown harmonies, and jangly early millennium indie-rock. Enlisting producer Daniel Ledwell (Jenn Grant, Fortunate Ones), MacDonald brought in the bulk of the track list from her pandemic lockdown era. The first of those songs was “January”; it opens In Waves with a haunting doubled vocal and gently propulsive strings, so effectively bare its immediacy feels as fresh as when she wrote it. “Glass Flowers,” whose sobering refrain sneaks up on you in the midst of all the girl-group sha-la-las: “Whoever said you can’t be too careful / they were wrong.” The Spector-esque harmonies seep into the following track, “Comes in Waves,” which details both MacDonald’s personal experience with the pandemic as well as the specialized one she had as a ER nurse during that time: “It all just comes and goes / and ebbs and flows / but somehow it never goes away.” Her voice is at its purest on the spare romance of “Eastern to Atlantic,” a late-night lullaby for adults. In Waves may begin in winter, but it slips gently through the seasons concluding with a big fall barn dance via “Rescue Mission, a boisterous song of gratitude that echoes early Wilco recordings. The refrain— “Where would I be without you?”—is directed at a single cherished person, but like In Waves itself, it’s at once specific and universal.