Boy Scouts

There is no question too big for Boy Scouts, and no detail too small to be glossed over on the way to an answer. On Wayfinder, the follow-up to the acclaimed 2019 album Free Company, Oakland-based songwriter Taylor Vick chases her queries to the very edge of the horizon. This is an album that's not afraid to track down what it all means -- how life unspools around the monoliths of love and death, the heavy knots of even quotidian conflict, the task of carrying your own suffering with you day after day, the challenge of meeting other people out here in the tangled expanse of living. In a warm, expansive style that recalls the raw punctures of Lucinda Williams and Alex G, Vick once again shows herself to be a fearless seeker shedding light on the unanswerable.

"Why are we alive? Is there a point to any of this? Have I done this before? I was thinking about these questions like that, just playing with these ideas and being curious, " she says. "I lost that curiosity for many years, and it came back to me in the last year. I started to wonder about these types of things again. It feels better to have curiosity for life."

These queries can sprout from easy, ponderous conversation just like everyday settings can harbor sudden turns of healing, even growth. On Wayfinder, Vick digs out that potential in even the most ordinary scenes. She hurls her questions at the ground, and they ricochet squarely at the sky, which, in its way, answers.