Staying Stateside and also staying with acoustic guitars, another favourite album of 2023 (and one actually released in 2023) has been Shana Cleveland’s “Manzanita”. The opening song of this “supernatural love album set in the California wilderness” is “A Ghost”:

Cleveland is songwriter, musician, visual artist, and writer, and also a member of Californian psychedelic surf rock band La Luz.

“Manzanita” may be a ‘love album’ but it’s a bit dark and weird, the songs populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits. It’s California, West Coast USA psychedelic back-country folk music of no fixed time or place, with a hint of Carny freak-show mixed in, by virtue of the lyrics and also the musical instrumentation and arrangements.

“Manzanita” is another album I kept coming back to throughout the year. A slow burner initially but you soon realise this is a dreamlike world of woozy enticing songs and sounds you want to revisit over and over again.