The follow-up to 2019's ebullient Today Was a Good Day,
Choices sees
Lucy Spraggan deliver an inward-looking, yet no less buoyant set of songs that detail an emotional year that began with a divorce and ended in new love and sobriety.
Spraggan treats the heavy subject matter with equal parts grace and humor, and as usual, puts her pop acumen on display. The 13-track set commences with the cinematic "Flowers," a lusty, flamenco-laced come-on replete with
Morricone-esque guitar stabs. As opening salvos go it's a stunner, but it's also a bit of a musical outlier, as what follows is more in line with the brisk and heartfelt folk-pop that
Spraggan has been trafficking in since emerging from The X Factor in 2012. Regret looms large over the otherwise sprightly "Roots," and the succinctly titled "Sober," which was written a week into her sobriety, tackles overcoming addiction with discomforting self-awareness -- "Sunrise guilt and sunset shame/Wish I could move and change my name."
Choices progresses along with its narrator as makes herself accountable for past actions on the melancholic "Heartbreak Suites," and confronts existential crisis on the moving "If I Had a God."
Spraggan remains one the more relatable and open-hearted songwriters around, so when she starts reaping the benefits of self-acceptance -- falling in love again on the bubbly "I Spent a Night in the Desert" and swapping out the oncoming train at the end of the tunnel with blazing sunlight on the anthemic, life-affirming closer "Why Don't We Start from Here" -- that hard-won joy becomes contagious. ~ James Christopher Monger