Gifts and Burdens
Holly O'Reilly entered the studio in Tacoma with a group of friends, including producer Evan Brubaker, and began cutting the tracks that would become Gifts & Burdens. She brought the best of her recent material with her and nestled it into intimate acoustic settings. The results were beautiful, sometimes almost painfully so - yet even though she was performing her own songs, she had no idea that they were speaking to her about changes yet to come.
'All my songs on Gifts & Burdens were written between 2003 and '06,” she says. 'Looking back on it, I can only say, 'Wow, how could I not know I was in trouble?' I had no idea that in writing these songs, I was writing about my own life.'
The Seattle Weekly says of Gifts and Burdens, 'the tunes often have a wistful, lonely, late-night quality about them but, at the same time, are not really a downer,' O’Reilly is singled out as 'sounding both compellingly contemporary and ancient simultaneously' by the Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange.
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