Letters from Sinners & Strangers

iTunes Review

In the spirit of Gillian Welch and her quest for musical transcendence through a devotion to old world-worn tradition, this Idaho-bred, Massachusetts-based singer Eilen Jewell and her third album, 2007’s Letters from Sinners & Strangers, dreams of a distant era where the Great Depression and its styles — jazz, western swing, folk — were active influences on people’s sense of sound and community. Whether she’s writing the songs herself (“Rich Man’s World”) or mining another old-school writer (Eric Andersen’s “Dusty Boxcar Wall,” Bob Dylan’s obscure “Walking Down the Line,” Charlie Rich’s “Thanks a Lot”), Jewell casts herself as a woman living through different times. She dips towards the alt.country of Lucinda Williams with her self-penned “In the End,” but that’s as comfortable as she gets with modern times. Jewell prefers to linger around the American south or the old west, sounding as if she’s been stuck at a border roadhouse for the past fifteen years with the Tex-Mex sway of “Where They Never Say Your Name” and “Too Hot to Sleep.”