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Long Night Moon Press

Catie Curtis, "Long Night Moon"

Pete Seeger says of Woody Guthrie: "Any fool can be complicated; it takes a real genius to be simple." There should be a corollary for today's folk-popsters: Any fool can write a love-gone wrong song; it takes a real genius to write a love-gone-right one. No urban songwriter does that better than Curtis. On her hushed and deeply felt new CD, "Long Night Moon," she sings grippingly about love's better moments: tracing the shadows on a lover's face, and the sweet delights of staying warm on a cold day. Like Guthrie, she is fearless about using simple imagery to draw us in: a night sky full of fireflies, or "headlights crossing my bedroom wall." Also like Guthrie, she can fine-focus political complexities into a stark, telling couplet: "If they can keep us fighting about marriage and God/ There'll be no one left to notice if our leaders do their jobs."