American jazz singer Samara Joy released a new album on Oct. 11 called “Portrait.” It is a follow up to the album she released in 2022, “Linger Awhile.” It features eight different songs that are all different but connect to the topic of her growth and development as a songwriter.
Lots of the songs in the album have different tempos, some being faster but the majority being slower. Some songs had similar tempos and that made them seem more repetitive. Joy is a jazz singer, so the music in the background of some songs is very fun with lots of drumming, trombone and piano. Other songs only feature the voice of Joy. Lots of the songs are very upbeat and funky with great background music like one of the songs, “Day By Day.” This song is made up with a majority of background music paired with vocals in certain parts.
One thing that I love is how much effort and emotion that you can tell Joy put into the album. Each of the songs are very unique with different instruments and singing. All the songs in the album pair really well together. I liked most songs, but something that I did not enjoy was how long certain ones were. Her song “Peace of Mind” is over seven minutes long and made me lose interest halfway through because it was very repetitive. There are other songs like this, such as “Reincarnation of a Lovebird” and “Now and Then,” both of which are over six minutes long. As much as I enjoyed the instrumental and singing parts of the songs, they went on for way too long and got boring for me after a while.
My favorite song in this album was “You Stepped Out Of A Dream.” This song is a love song about a person Joy feels is so perfect it’s like they stepped out of a dream. This song featured a great instrumental background and I loved the lyrics. This is one of the songs in the album that I think was also a great length because I didn’t lose interest listening to it like I did in some of the other songs in this album. My least favorite song in this album was “Peace Of Mind.” In the parts of the song that had lyrics, her voice sounded amazing, but there was not enough of that throughout the song. The song carried on for a long time and the tempo was really slow, so after some time it got boring.
Comparing this to her previous album, “Linger Awhile,” you can tell that Joy has definitely grown as a songwriter and as an artist. Her music, voice and passion for singing have changed a lot. The songs in “Portrait” sound more mature in a way. Something that I noticed is that her songs in “Linger Awhile” are much shorter than her songs in “Portrait,” so I am wondering if that was intentional, and Joy had a goal to release longer tracks.
I would recommend this song to anyone who has a passion for jazz music and anyone who likes to listen to longer songs that focus more on instruments over singing. I would give this album three stars because as much as I loved the instruments and the vocals from Joy, the song length made me lose interest. I would have loved for there to be more intriguing lyrics. The songs were good but there were many factors that were needed to make this album more interesting.
“Portrait:” ★★★☆☆
