Artist:     David Olney & Anana Kaye

Album:     Whispers and Sighs

Label:     Self-released

Release Date:     3.26.21

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David Olney’s shadow still looms large over an Americana scene that misses him dearly. His absence has only made the heart grow fonder, and so will the fanciful chamber-folk and atmospheric, roots-music immersion of Whispers and Sighs, Olney’s intoxicating last hurrah. A final salute then to the old master’s brilliant artistry and affection soft spot for affecting fairy tales.

Well before his onstage death over a year ago from a sudden heart attack, Olney was involved in a creative love triangle of sorts with the spellbinding Eastern European chanteuse Anana Kaye and her talented guitarist and arranger husband, Irakli Gabriel, both natives of the country of Georgia. The three silhouettes on the cover penned every song on Whispers and Sighs, with contributions from John Hadley. Inside its moonlit packaging, Olney writes about dreaming of boozy nights with Kaye and Gabriel and deep conversations that led to impromptu jam sessions, with Olney openly wondering if he had blurred the lines of reality and fantasy.

Slipping in and out of haunting, somnambulant reveries, chasing fleeting memories down foggy alleys of the subconscious, Whispers and Sighs works in mysterious ways, as the ghostly “World We Used to Know” surges with martial drums and distant sounds of war and the watery, exotic noir of “Thank You Note” tangos seductively in the dark. Fond, and not so fond, farewells recounted by the grandfatherly Olney in the wistful “My Favorite Goodbye” smile bravely through streaming tears, while a blend of soft, cooing vocals glow in the yearning, melancholic gloaming of “Why Can’t We Get This Right?” Whispers and Sighs asks the tough questions, and it is not as quiet as its title would suggest.

The noisy guitars and stabbing, burbling menace of an angry and moody “Lie to Me, Angel” and the strutting, whirling energy and spiraling saxophones of a sardonic toast to the “Last Days of Rome” serve as the album’s rock ‘n roll black sheep. They are gripping and dramatic anomalies in a sea of reflective ballads weaving Kaye’s lovely piano, other keyboards, and melodica, as well as gently plucked acoustic guitar, with her artful string arrangements. Such elements coalesce beautifully in “Behind Your Smile,” the cavernous and heartbreaking title track and the lush, slowly rendered “My Last Dream of You.”

At the end of Whispers and Sighs, just after Kaye’s witchy reading of a sashaying, country-tinged “Tennessee Moon” brings to mind Stevie Nicks’ black magic, Olney is left alone in the stark, Old-World folk emptiness of “The Great Manzini (Disappearing Act)” to commiserate with an aging magician in a somber, moving meditation on mortality. Does it indicate Olney had an inkling his days were numbered? Maybe it does, but such questions are quickly forgotten when contemplating the absolute genius at work here.

—Peter Lindblad