She finds it in flashes: on Barfly, a terse, downhearted tune inspired by Jack Kerouac’s sojourn in Big Sur, and Living a Lie, written with the album’s producer, Paul Bryan, and featuring James Mercer of the Shins. (Less a duet than a passive-aggressive spat, it has some good zingers: “No one bears a grudge like a boy genius/Just past his prime.”)
Along similar lines, Disappeared turns the tables on the sort of guy who shuts people out of his life: “A forgotten face behind a beard,” Mann calls him. And on Soon Enough, a piano-driven tune written with comedian Tim Heidecker, she calls out an unspecified cruelty, arming herself with sarcasm: “‘Cause what’s more fun/Than other people’s hell?”
— NATE CHINEN, NYTimes News Service
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