Okay, so I'm having serious trouble reviewing this in a clever, quotable way so, as one of JoAnna's card carrying top 5 fans, let me just drop a tangent on you. I effing love this record. Jo and I have spent countless hours in Boston coffeehouses or sprawled across municipal lawns arguing the finer points of lyric writing, and in my awkwardly verbose nature we have traded hundreds of pages worth of emails on the subject, even if that quantity is weighted heavily in my favor. Tracks like "Closer To You" and "Shut Out The Lights" clearly demonstrate her intuitive storytelling, single lines filling out the scene like a deliberate pan across the room before settling on the action.

But lets get down to why I keep coming back to listen to JoAnna, and it's not because we're friends. Jo sings from the gut in a way that is almost unsettling for such an unassuming little girl. She's goofy, skinny as a rail, and can't weigh more than a buck o' five, but start her singing and she blows down houses like a hungry wolf. Yeah, she can ball you up on the floor when she sings:

I turn the key, make a wish, flip the switch
Is this all that there is, is this it?
And I slide down the apartment door
I'm alone. Nothing to go home for any more.

But she doesn't need the power of a strong lyric to empty your last box of kleenex. Wait till she hit's the chorus in "Christina" and just repeats that name over and over again. I even knew what was coming on this song, I probably read down 10 drafts of it as she filled a small collection of notebooks trying to finish it, but I still wasn't prepared for the impact the first time I finally heard it. Even on the 20th listen it's still leveling. When she hits that first B in the chorus and lets it drag just a moment before breaking into vibrato, you can hear the microphone begging to redline, you can hear the dimensions of the room, and you can hear the frustrated cry of a woman who has entirely let go.

Order the EP, the poster, and other goodies online from JoAnna's Myspace.