Nana Grizol, Love It Love It

by dave heaton

"Will we ever feel that way again / like we were so close that we could live inside of one another's skin?," Theo Hilton sings in the bittersweet, impassioned friendship song "Will We", three-fourths of the way through his band Nana Grizol's album Love It Love It. It's a song that sticks out for me as a sort of emotional fulcrum for the album, encapsulating the way people who like to stay on the move, to keep life an open question, run up against the longing for community, for closeness.

In a way the whole album seems a work of community, the way Hilton's songs are surrounded by the playing and singing of 9 other people, with horns and so on. The songs themselves have the troubadour life within them, sounding similar at times to early Bright Eyes or to David Dondero, whose "Less Than the Air" they do a great version of here. There's a freewheeling spirit of creative uplift throughout Love It Love It, right from the quick melodic burst of opening track "Circles 'Round the Moon", which has a line I relate to sometimes – "it should be unlawful / to live where you can't see the stars".

Of course I can't see any stars from my house, and yes it is awful. That push-pull, country vs city living, is part of Love It Love It's fabric, along with all the other decisions, movements, mistakes and conflicts of life. "Are you having second thoughts about that path that you chose?", he sings at some point. Nana Grizol's songs are rollicking and imaginative, they sometimes float and fly, but they're rooted in the choices and questions that people live with every day.

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