REVIEW: Laci Kaye Booth Is the Bravest Girl In America On ‘Love Ain’t For The Faint Of Heart’
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY AVERY HEERINGA ☆
Photo by Natalie Sakstrup
In bell hooks’ 1999 book All About Love: New Visions, she writes that “the practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” The idea of love being riddled with both risk and reward seems especially connected to the core of Laci Kaye Booth’s sophomore LP Love Ain’t For the Faint of Heart. Across 12 songs, Booth lays it all bare, curating a kaleidoscopic and twangy landscape for her lovelorn confessions to inhabit, using echoing production and soul-baring lyrics to capture the explosive highs and lows of the emotion.
Faint of Heart follows Booth’s 2024 debut album The Loneliest Girl in the World, an evocative compendium of stories about no-good cowboys, longing for love and damn good dive bars. But the road to get to Loneliest Girl, and by extension, Faint of Heart, was marked with a pre-pandemic run on American Idol, two EPs, and getting dropped from Big Machine Records in 2022. Loneliest Girl operated as a reintroduction of sorts, sharply defining Booth’s resoundingly cinematic approach to country music alongside producer and co-writer Ben West (Ella Langley, Leon Bridges). Now, Faint of Heart arrives as an even clearer encapsulation of the world she debuted two years ago.
“Ride Or Die” opens the record, placing Booth in the getaway car with her new beau, presumably fleeing whoever made her “the loneliest girl in the world.” “Tonight let’s ride or die / Be my adrenaline high,” she belts across the song’s chorus. “Take me somewhere / Anywhere but where I’ve been / ‘Cause Lord knows I can’t go back to him.” Just one track later, on “Different,” she assures her subject that she isn’t like the other girls he’s loved, and promises not to hurt him in the same way.
“Different” is a superb cut on its own made even more delicious by the fact Booth co-wrote the song (and two others) with her current boyfriend and fellow singer-songwriter Morgan Evans. The detail isn’t necessary to appreciate the song’s sweeping strings and pitter-patter percussion, but can’t help but enrich its impact. “Sometimes I wonder if you miss her / Sometimes I think I see the scar,” she sings in her signature honeyed voice. “But can’t you see I’m different, baby, can’t you see I’m different? / I’m not gonna hurt you baby, wait a second listen.”
By the time “The World Keeps Spinning” follows with dreamy pedal steel and acoustic guitar, the sheen of her new relationship fades. “Cross my heart / Hope to survive,” she sings softly, which seems an apt thesis of the record as a whole. “Hold my breath / Watch our love die.”
The real centerpiece of Faint of Heart arrives with “Pathetic,” a lush and heart-wrenching midtempo cut dripping in pedal steel and organ. The song is Booth at her very best: unafraid to push beyond her voice’s sweetly malaised default, backed by a creamy-smooth set of guitar, and devastatingly honest lyricism. “Ain't it pathetic? / Can't believe I even said it / I'm trying to be poetic, authentic / Chronic hopeless romantic,” she exhales on the song’s chorus. “It's crazy / Everything else takes a backseat / When love cuts and I bleed, I think I let it / Ain't it pathetic?”
Frequent collaborator West returns on “Pathetic,” and scatters his sonic fingerprints across the entirety of the record. Booth and West’s approach is one that excels at evoking a physical and sonic landscape for lyrics to fall into, from the trinket box ballerina chords that open the record to the echo and literal space her voice is given to cocoon her listeners in. Country heavyweight Luke Laird (Kacey Musgraves, Carrie Underwood) lends his co-writing skills on “Ethereal Redneck Shit” and Emily Weisband (Megan Moroney, Camila Cabello) contributes her songwriting efforts on the final two tracks.
“Hell Or High Water” finds Booth more self-assured (“Ride or die, I guess I'm riding on”) atop a punchy layer of seamlessly blended baritone electric guitar and drums. “Daddy’s Mugshot” is Booth’s outlaw-inspired cut, doling out lines like “What runs in the blood ain’t ever gonna stop / I might look like my mama but I smile like my daddy’s mugshot.” While the album’s title implies that romantic love is the only kind on the table, Booth takes several detours while conquering romance’s explosive nature. Songs like “Daddy’s Mugshot,” in addition to “Ethereal Redneck Shit” and “Luck of the Draw,” are brief reprieves from the record’s central theme of romantic love—not quite connected thematically but still linked together sonically.
At times, Booth’s lyrics become slightly muddled in the dreamlike scenes painted by her voice’s natural fuzz and wistful delivery. Enunciation, as is often the case in popular music, gets lost at times, but not before Booth pushes out her syllables for maximum impact when it really counts.
The title track itself veers off from the theme of romance, and turns its lens wider to familial bonds and even Booth’s affection for her dog. “Ain't it so cruel how God gives you things to hold to take 'em all away?” she sings before fluttering into a delicate falsetto for the song’s chorus. “Love ain’t for the faint of heart / Be careful, it’ll leave its mark.” The track feels like a thematic relative of Kara Jackson’s “why does the earth give us people to love?” which similarly contemplates the price of loving and the cost of grief.
The record’s closing ballad, sequenced just after the title track, serves as a kind of answer to the titular dilemma, ultimately proclaiming, “And I Love You More Than Anything.” The pared-back piano swoon is a steady breath after the preceding rollercoaster, resolved in its naming of things Booth unabashedly loves, from “Christmas-flavored coffee” to “talking to the moon.” Breaking the fourth wall of sorts, she sings, “I’ve spent my life taking my hurt / And painting it with pretty words / Baring all and calling it a dream.”
The closing track rounds out the quest for love mapped across the preceding 11 tracks, ultimately deeming it all worth it. If it’s true that love ain’t for the faint of heart, Booth seems to be among the bravest—unafraid to embrace it in all of its messiness, fury and sweet sonic bliss.
