Longtime Ball of Wax friend Holly Small returns with “Ghosted,” a spare track that does a lot with a few ingredients. A minimalist electronic bed of beeps and boops backs up Holly’s jazz- and R&B-inflected riffs on life from the point of view of a ghost. The term “haunting” is overused in music criticism – especially in connection with women’s voices – but it applies in a very literal sense here. Holly’s voice is strong and sure yet sensitive, and her words inhabit the loneliness and displacement that would likely come with being an actual ghost, if such a thing existed. One of art’s superpowers is to elicit sympathy in unexpected places, and our friend Holly has done a fine job flexing that sympathetic muscle in “Ghosted.”
Holly will play this and other favorites (including, I hope, a few we’ve heard on BoW before) at the Ball of Wax 56 show on Thursday, June 20th!