we’ve got two parts here. There are three albums that are just her, purely solo, which aren’t riveting but which I do enjoy and appreciate, and three albums that are her with collaborators, which I find significantly more dull and less interesting. For the first three, I feel like it’s kinda an evolved, more mature version of what she did with New Bohemians. I don’t necessarily like more, but I do think it could be called “better”, if that makes sense. More put together, more focused. It’s kinda like… I feel like if I’d grown up listening to it, if my parents had been into it when I was little, I’d love it now and it’d kinda be part of me. But it doesn’t actually super grab my attention listening now. I’m curious to see how my feelings about it develop.
I don’t love the last three, the Steve Martin stuff and the musical. It’s fine, and it’s not really different, it’s just more of the folksy slow part of her stuff, the part I don’t super care for. The musical especially is not my jam, I think it’s the most meh musical I’ve ever listened to. Zero songs stuck with me, zero of any of it stuck with me, it just felt like big broadway affectations on songs that didn’t benefit from it (and that I didn’t really like that much anyway), I’m kinda surprised it made it onto Broadway at all, to be honest, much less got Tony nominations.
Putting it all together, I think it’s fair to say she definitely continues to get better and stronger in her music as time goes on, but that growth is also visible and accessible via New Bohemians, and in her solo/Steve Martin stuff she goes in a direction that’s just not very interesting to me. This is gonna be a B
tunafruitsandwitch 
I enjoy Edie Brickells’ solo stuff, just not enough to keep any particular song in my ongoing playlist. It’s nice, but just nice. I did enjoy hearing the transformation of many songs into a Broadway Musical version. I especially liked Another Round (the Broadway version) and Always Will (the solo version, but the Broadway version was nice too). Nice. And as nice as it is, for me, I can’t give above a C+ if I add nothing to my playlist, so C+ for Edie Brickell it is!
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