A River Running to Your Heart (★★★★☆) is deeply preoccupied with the idea of the places we plant ourselves and what they come to mean to us.
This time there is a pronounced sense of immediacy to the songs, leaving little doubt that River is an album about some very particular places as much as it is about “place” as a concept.These are not exactly places that we can go and visit ourselves.
Instead, they are places as experienced by someone in a particular state, often at a particular time.Johnson, it turns out, has a lot of insights into what makes a place feel like home, and they land all the more strongly for their casual delivery.
He is surely not the first artist to romanticize the city of Tacoma, but the way he does so on the song of the same name feels singularly his own.It lingers on a city that means a lot to him, never explicitly telling us why that is.
Read more on metroweekly.com