Becky Warren has gathered acclaim for her songs about other people—veterans on her debut album, War Surplus, and entrepreneurs experiencing homelessness on her second album, Undesirable. For the first time, on The Sick Season (out 10/23/20), Warren turns her focus inward, delivering a deeply personal set of songs propelled by the same catchy, guitar-driven rock that made her earlier albums critical successes.
By the time Undesirable came out in October 2018, Warren was barely leaving her Nashville house. She should have been capitalizing on great reviews from outlets like Rolling Stone Country (who named Undesirable one of the 20 best country and Americana albums of the year), Billboard, and NPR Music. Instead, she hardly toured behind the record at all, aside from sporadic dates opening for the Indigo Girls. The debilitating depression that she’d battled successfully with medication for years had returned in a form that was completely treatment resistant.
This dark period lasted 16 months. While Warren had previously had visions of a third concept album about other people, the longer the blackness went on, the more it became the only thing she could write about. And so she did. But as she did on her earlier albums, Warren approached the topic with a sense of humor and an abiding love of anthemic rock melodies. There are songs where her depression is personified, like the slinky “Favorite Bad Penny”, where depression is a demonic but seductive woman who keeps turning back up like a bad penny. There’s sly humor, like in the slow building “Me and These Jeans” where Warren captures the occasional delirium of having spent months in her house—”Me and these jeans, we’re out on the town if the town is my house, if it’s not then we’re back on the couch”. And at times there’s heartbreak, like on “Tired of Sick”, where Emily Saliers (of the Indigo Girls) joins on vocals to capture a moment that feels plaintive and desperate.
When the depression finally lifted, Warren was keen to make the record surrounded by those who supported her through the darkness, so she brought in longtime friends: guitarist Avril Smith (of Warren’s former band The Great Unknowns and now of Della Mae), bassist Jeremy Middleton (Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen), and drummer Megan Jane (Hannah Dasher, Side Piece). Together with producer/multi-instrumentalist Jordan Brooke Hamlin (Sarah Potenza, Indigo Girls), they recorded the album in the intimate slightly-out-of-Nashville MOXE. By happenstance, the album that catalogs the frustration, sadness, anger, and humor of the 16 months Warren spent sequestered at home battling depression is suddenly topical. It comes out during a time when many of us are sequestered at home for other reasons, and the songs speak to this current Sick Season as well. That gives Warren’s most personal album to date a resonance she never could have expected.