[Photo courtesy of Greg Freeman]

By Julia Weber, Editorial Director

[Darling Recordings; 2024]

Rating: 8/10

Pittsburgh-based singer-songwriter Merce Lemon’s newest single, “Crow,” from her forthcoming album is everything she does best: slow build ups, sweeping vocals and the wistfulness of everyday life and ordinary experiences. It’s an exercise in contemplation and Lemon has mastered it.

The third single from Lemon’s album Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild — due Sept. 27 via Darling Recordings — finds the artist contemplating the inner world of crows and pondering temporality. Lemon is pensive as she preserves what is, by its very nature, a fleeting experience.

What starts as a quiet and unassuming tune gradually builds into a careening full band performance, slowly pulling electric guitar and drums that matches Lemon’s progressing vocal intensity. Striking instrumentation piles on and pairs with Lemon’s echoing of the chorus as she sings “Even let the crows come, rest their necks and nest their young” repeatedly.

Lemon has a talent for picking out the mundane, ordinary experiences and turning them into a deeply moving and meaningful testament to the richness of life. To me, her music evokes the feeling of dusk when trees lose their three-dimensionality against the blue-pink gradient of the sky.

“Crow” takes a typical moment — watching the crows fly by from a rooftop — that any one of us might experience and asks: isn’t it a wonder that we get to do this? To sit on the rooftop and watch the crows? To be alive to witness it all? The result of these questions is a deeply cathartic song that nudges itself into the pit of your stomach and the back of your throat long after the track ends.