Good Girl Blues

Defying the singular title, it appears that good girls can also bring a nice mesh of rock, pop and folk mixed in with their blues. Julie Meyers has been writing her own songs since her teens, but spent much of the past few years playing with Sacto bands SquishtheBadMan, The Foreign Cinema and The Sores. With her girl-next-door appeal, Meyers may surprise you at first when she flips her soft and beautiful voice into a release of emotional power. But she’s always in control of her vocal vents. In the track “Sunday,” the Sacramento songstress uses a simple drum and guitar rhythm to give tempo and power to her dualistic voice, allowing it to climb to the point when the listener fears she may lose control only to pull back at the last second. The continual avoidances of these near implosions are akin to watching a high-diver pull off a skilled dive minutes before the belly-flop crash—it is all the more satisfying to the audience when she succeeds beautifully.