Does Ellie Jackson have to repeat herself? Throughout her fantastic debut LP Stay Soft, Jackson continually cuts through the bullshit and drivers her point home—over and over and over again. “Love is such an easy thing to say,” she sings a total of eight times on the opening title track. “I don’t want to watch my own back anymore,” she sings eight more times on “Time Is Like Taffy.” That the latter lyrical octuplet is capped by an exasperated/furious “I’m. So. Tired!” speaks volumes about Jackson’s headspace.
All of this is to say that Jackson Is. Fed. Up. But also: vulnerable, sly, cagey, playful, selfish, giving, in a mood. Following a handful of singles dating back to 2020, Stay Soft finds the longtime Milwaukee utility player fully stepping into the spotlight and putting her many selves on display. She’s backed by frequent collaborators Caley Conway, Emily Wagner-Morrow, Barry Paul Clark, Devin Drobka, Andrew Koenig, and Josh Evert. Together they create not only a long-awaited debut, but one of the best Milwaukee albums of the year.
At 13 tracks and 45 minutes, Stay Soft has the feeling of clearing the decks, of leaving everything on the table. There’s the indie crunch of “Taffy” and the country flourish of “The Way Of Things.” There’s the slinky NSFW bedroom tryst of “Destroy Me.” There’s the noisy stomp of “1000 Head Of Garlic,” complete with taunts of “You’re never gonna find another good woman in this city again.” Late in the album, on “I’ll Leave You Alone,” Jackson grapples with her multitudes: “I’m nuclear fission, splitting in two / One’s floating in space, one’s sitting with you.”
Politics bubble to the surface and burst. “What part of God’s image was I made in? / One nation under him making everything great again? / I can’t believe,” Jackson sings on the incendiary “American Dream.” Earlier, on the winningly buoyant “Into The Blue,” she wracks her brain for the details of a first meeting. “Was it building pipe bombs or marijuana cigarettes?” she wonders. The beguiling “Skin,” meanwhile, functions both as a public plea (“Don’t fear the other / Sisters and brothers here / Don’t fear the other”) and a personal promise (“If I ever choose to stay the same / Take me outside and read me anything”).
Sonically, Stay Soft is anything but. The majority of the record’s tracks are beautifully blown out and in-the-red; distorted guitars, distorted pedal steel, and distorted drums are the order of the day. That sound recedes only occasionally, like on the acoustic confessional “Friends Forever,” and the lovely late-night closer “Whale Song.” The former is Jackson at her most yearning and brutally honest: “Why can’t I be easily satisfied? / There’s a great big ice cream cone in the sky / And I reach and reach and reach for it in messy desperation / I wish I could feel happy in the place I’m in.”
That “grass is always greener” sentiment is universal, but the image of an ice cream cone—both in “Friends Forever” and on the album’s cover—is uniquely telling. Jackson is preaching strength through softness, power through openness. It’s such a simple message, such a simple truth. It’s a shame it has to be repeated over and over and over again.
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