Whitney Walker’s “Solar Princess” is a love song that knows it’s at the peak and says so, the appreciation itself the whole subject. No approach, no departure, just the specific clarity of being inside something good and recognizing it while it’s happening. Dana Colley of Morphine arrives with a baritone saxophone, late-night weight dropped into a song Walker himself places next to “Wonderful Tonight.” Clapton’s version of that feeling is clean, unguarded devotion with no alibi. Walker’s runs it through an aesthetic somewhere between Tom Waits knocking over garbage cans and a dinner date with someone who might be dangerous, the warmth is real, the edges are still there.
Blood Harmony, Walker’s third record for RascalZ RecordZ, is where “Solar Princess” lands. An artist whose natural register tends toward the odd writing a straightforward love song is not a contradiction here, it’s the whole point. The strangeness doesn’t undercut the feeling. It’s just what the feeling sounds like coming from Walker.
