Listening to Ali McGuirk’s Watertop
The thing I kept getting stuck on while listening to Watertop wasn’t a lyric or a melody. It was a question.
Who is this person?
Not Ali McGuirk the artist. Not Ali McGuirk the bio at the bottom of a press release. The actual person. The one walking around the grocery store on a Tuesday afternoon. The one sitting in traffic. The one who has conversations she replays later and wishes she’d answered differently.
Most records tell you exactly who you’re dealing with. Sometimes within the first song. By track three you’ve usually got the whole picture. You know who’s heartbroken, who’s angry, who’s enlightened, who’s got the answers. Watertop never gave me that kind of certainty. Every time I thought I had a read on McGuirk, another song would come along and tilt the picture slightly.
“Love Goes First” was the first time I noticed it. The song is built around an idea that plenty of writers would have turned into a rallying cry. McGuirk doesn’t. She never seems interested in standing at the front of the room. She introduces the thought, spends some time with it, and lets it breathe.
I found myself returning to “Graveyard” for a similar reason. There are old mistakes hanging around that song. Old habits too. McGuirk acknowledges them and keeps moving. She doesn’t stop the record to explain what she learned or why she’s better now. The song leaves a few loose ends on the table. I ended up trusting it more because of that.
The song I spent the most time with was probably “More Than Enough.” It felt familiar in a way I couldn’t quite shake. The relationship at the center of the song reminded me of the kind of love that stops announcing itself after a while. You don’t talk about it much because it’s woven into everyday life. It’s school drop-offs before work, dance class on Saturday mornings, figuring out what’s for dinner, and a hundred other little routines that don’t seem important until one day you realize they’ve become the framework of a life together. That’s what this song reminded me of. Not romance in the movie sense. Something much steadier than that.
As the album moved along, I started noticing how often McGuirk seemed more interested in observation than conclusion. “Where Does All The $ Come From?” asks questions that could have easily become a lecture in somebody else’s hands. Instead, it feels like the beginning of a conversation. The same thing happens on “Exorcist.” There are bigger emotions in that song, but even then she never sounds eager to wrap everything up with a lesson and send everybody home.
Maybe that’s why I kept wondering about the person behind the songs.
The record never feels like it’s trying to manage its image. It doesn’t sound concerned with appearing wise or wounded or profound. It sounds like somebody paying attention to the world around them and writing down what they find. Not everything on the record arrives neatly packaged, which is probably why I believed it.
By the time I reached “Call It What You Want,” I still wasn’t entirely sure which song I liked best.
Normally I know by then. There’s usually a track that separates itself pretty quickly. This album never worked that way. One week it was “Graveyard.” Then I’d catch myself thinking about “More Than Enough.” A few days later I’d be out mowing the lawn and realize part of “Exorcist” had been bouncing around my head all afternoon. Every time I thought I’d settled on a favorite, another song stepped forward.
I ended up liking that about the record. Every time I thought I had it figured out, something else would jump out at me.
I still don’t feel like I have a complete picture of who Ali McGuirk is after listening to Watertop.
The funny thing is, I don’t really mind.
There are a few songs on this record i’ll certainly come back to. A few questions I’ll keep turning over. That’s more than I can say for most albums I hear in a given week.