By Charles Craighill
A month ago, Julianna Sweeney released her debut album Exit Fo[u]r following her three singles released over the past three years. The indie-folk project consists of fairly simple instrumentation— drums with light whips and brushes, folk instruments including some tasteful banjo and pedal steel guitar, along with Julianna’s vocals and guitar. The lead part also features a saw… which I wouldn’t typically classify as a traditional folk instrument, but it fits the song well somehow.
Her wide-ranging voice, reminiscent of Florence + the Machine, reach the high notes with ease, sometimes entering a head voice sigh and sometimes keeping power from her chest. This dynamic range and tone with accompanying harmonies bring out the nuances of her voice. Overall, this project is dripping with emotion, which Sweeney brings out with her hard-hitting lyrics.
“I lost my mom to metastatic breast cancer a few months before I graduated high school and shortly after I entered into my first relationship,” Julianna Sweeney wrote about “ready,” the first song off the album. “The problem was, it was short-lived because it wasn't real and I was using it to put off processing what happened with my mom. I didn't fully grasp that until I wrote this song a few years later. It is a folk anthem and was written, recorded, produced, and engineered in a very unconventional way.”
