When music is satisfying enough, it is rarely necessary to come up with endless comparisons to other similar sounds. Indeed, it’s often difficult.

It is difficult because at a point it becomes irrelevant. Taming that inner comparison-making beast is the most rewarding way to listen to Shelley Miller’s newest record, When It’s All Gone, You Come Back, which is enjoyable enough to discourage all brands of musical pinpointing. The album has a fervor that reveals its creator’s reverence for folk influences, a reverence used tenaciously with Miller’s personality to unleash a soft and hot originality.

Admittedly, it’s also a bit uncomfortable to write a review about an album you want to keep listening to over and over again. This is the case with Miller’s album, swollen as it is with upbeat melancholia and dusted with poetic aphorisms and the occasional reflection of personal trials that ended up educational and enriching.

But, stepping back, one doesn’t have to be overly holistic to enjoy the album. Fortunately, When It’s All Gone loses no flavor if we call it what it is: an indispensible collection of well-crafted folk and pop songs. Miller has raw poetic power, which she adeptly channels into beautifully acoustic songwriting.

“Blame the Sky” contains a sampling of Miller’s bread and butter; a graceful guitar that lays softly over gentle, albeit fully convinced, vocals. Hard Love” contains classic folk and country styles with a contemporary vibe that includes turns-of-phrase (“the best I could be is the buckle that burned your skin”), more nuanced and less subversive than you might expect from Woody Guthrie or Dave Van Ronk.

Contemporary and classic songwriting values clash against each other often in this album. “All the way down,” while particularly light, is relevant enough for the radio waves. “Fool for loving you,” as well as several other songs on the second half of the disc, is completely and unabashedly 90s.

I almost just caught myself from making a comparison to a popular femme-fatal of the early-90s folk-pop revival, but as I said earlier, the references are not necessary here.

When It’s All Gone comes off as a celebration of influences and their complex relationship to an individual’s (artist’s) life. For example, Miller describes herself on her website as a singer, a songwriter and, finally, a human. The description is perfect in the way it seems both to characterize Miller’s attitude toward her own music while doubling as a comment on the act of creating itself. She is a singer first; aware of her musical debt to the shoulders of giants and others that preceded her. She’s a songwriter second; using the musical forms and adding her vitality, personality and singing ability to make something new, as Pound’s maxim goes. And she’s a human last, which acts as the great equalizer, and the way any artist worth her salt reaches the soul of her intended audience. For being a card-carrying member of humankind is the only sure way to sing about humanity.

That may have gotten weird. But if you dig folk, I dare you read a Bloom’s thoughts on Coleridge, turn on this album and then try not get philosophical on everyone’s ass.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Catch Shelley Miller on Sunday, July 4 at Taste of Chicago’ Best Buy Stage at 3:30 p.m.!

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Shelley Miller -- “Figure It Out”