The first Shawn Colvin album I listened to, A Few Small Repairs (1996), was the commercial breakthrough, and though following by a full five years, the next, A Whole New You (2001), was the pop-oriented follow-up. But Fat City is a project of a very different context. Following her Grammy-winning debut Steady On (1989), Fat City features an artist not yet widely known to the average radio listener, yet also prominent and respected enough to earn guest appearances from musicians like Joni Mitchell, Bruce Hornsby, and Richard Thompson. These musicians had realized what everyone else was in the process of discovering: that Colvin is a seriously good songwriter.
Fat City opens with “Polaroids,” perhaps the most obviously folk song on the album by virtue of its repeated acoustic guitar progression and its storytelling. (The delineation between pop and folk is, to my ears, pretty vague most of the time.) It’s a compelling piece, weaving a lyrically beautiful story of an inevitably fading intercontinental relationship. From a musical standpoint, I enjoy the way the music of the verses tenses toward the end, but not at the end, returning to the steadier, calmer progression for a few more bars after. Featuring also a beautiful guitar solo on, evidently, Weisenborn Hawaiian guitar (I don’t believe I’ve seen that credit on an album before), “Polaroids” is an effective start to what proves to be a very good album.
There are a number of highlights here. After the comparably subdued “Polaroids,” Colvin kicks up the tempo with the country rock-styled “Tennessee,” an engaging track featuring prominent banjo and the aforementioned Richard Thompson on electric guitar. One prominent element of this album, perhaps first on clear display here, is that Colvin’s vocal performance is terrific. She seems especially engaged with the material, and the sound is very much as if the performance is live, guitar in hand, leading the band behind her. I don’t know how producer Larry Klein actually recorded this album, and given the litany of session men providing the instrumentation Colvin was most likely not working with a full unit at any time, but it feels that way and that’s what counts, because it creates a tangible energy that takes the material at times to another level.
“Round of Blues” is a winner too, a driving composition with an airy, breezy chorus that not only engages on its own, but also works wonderfully as a lead-in to a fantastic harmonic bridge. It’s a favorite, as is “Orion in the Sky,” a six-and-a-half-minute track that earns its length with a poetic lyric and a hell of a climax in the last couple minutes. From: https://friendlyfiremusic.tumblr.com/post/128108736178/shawn-colvin-fat-city-1992-harrison-reviews
