Diane Cluck

Macy's Day Bird (2001) solidified her style of lo-fi folk elegies for voice and acoustic guitar. The best moments are when soaring melody and creative singing balance and boost each other, as in Save Me. Hover Not has multi-tracked vocals like a Renaissance song. Heat From Every Corner conveys a dreamy and quasi new-age feeling. The anti-pop conversational bard of Macy's Day Bird with minimal melodic impetus is less convincing than the philosopher of the longer, pensive and poignant Yatzee Dice. She replaces the guitar with the harmonium for God Made It Rain and, while she is no Nico, the instrument helps craft an atmosphere that is both intimate and lyrical, and in standout Battlefield Nurse encourages her to use her voice in a prayer-like form. But clearly she's more interested in the words than in the music.

The six-song EP Black With Green Leaves (2002) contains Crash Through the Half-Light and Pathway to Eden.

Her finger-picking greatly improved on Oh Vanille/ Ova Nil (Important, 2004): it "inhabits" songs like All I Bring You Is Love and Telepathic Desert which would otherwise too plain and blunt. Creative guitarwork rips through the harsh Sandy Ree and the passionate Bones and Born Again (both enlivened by multi-tracked vocals). At the same time, the construction and tone of songs like Half a Million Miles From Home recall early-days Joni Mitchell The voice instead fuels the torment of the bluesy Held Together. Easy to Be Around is unusually upbeat and poppy, almost a parody of doo-wop era female groups (with multi-tracked vocals). The closer Wild Deer at Dawn is a simple gentle folk melody with a few touches of harmonium.

Countless Times (Voodoo-Eros, 2005), recorded to four-track cassette in her apartment, contains songs with bolder vocal styles, like How Long? and Wasn't I Glad, as well as the harmonium-tinged Mystery Over Mind and the spectral six-minute My Teacher Died/ Countless Times. This would remain the most "lo-fi" of her recordings.

The 23-song Monarcana (Very Friendly, 2006) is actually a short album because most of the songs are brief recitations of poems, brief vocal experiments, brief street singalongs (a sort of rarity collection of material recorded between 2001 and 2004). There is the piano-based freak-folk of Beatless Wonder but also the old-fashioned multi-tracked vocals of Diamonds. There is the exotic and surreal Leave Me Alone but also the Indian-Celtic instrumental Reverly. There is the dissonant lied Gardenovena but also the gentle folkish If You See Sunlight The standout is the harmonium-fueled psychedelic psalm Honed Hemmed In, the peak of her vocal experiments.

She then relocated to Charlottesville in Virginia.

The eight-song mini-album Boneset (2014), which came out after an eight-year hiatus, contains Sara, a melismatic Celtic-inspired lullaby.