Without getting too mushy, Laura Gibson makes you want to cuddle. She makes the sort of soft sound that feels like bedding and comforters and logs crackling above a tame, but toasty fire. She makes a person want to close their eyes and just bask in a star-filled night full of big moon air kisses of white illumination. It begs for the embrace, for the warm breath against the side of a neck or over a fleshy ear lobe and sideburn.
There's a lot of autumn in Gibson's If You Come To Greet Me, an album of sinewy melodies and lavish amounts of darling foliage, but there's a swath of all of the four seasons poking out from beneath the covers. There are frosty feelings of winter that contain some biting lashes, some of the lush turnings of springtime and the exasperating and unavoidable heat of summer. Mostly, she's an autumnal songwriter, great for bonfires and absolutely a perfect complement to an evening meant for cradling a mug of hot apple cider or cocoa. She's sweater weather personified. She's those vintage ones that wear like a promise.
One can begin to think about hibernation and what would happen if we too laid down for months of slumber, but were able to pipe whatever we wanted into some headphones. What if we chose to have Gibson there are our three-month lullaby, singing to us blindly as we survived on our fatty storages, lying there for days and days as snow storms hit and went outside and never did we feel a single prink of Jack Frost's handiwork. I wonder what we'd wake as, whether it would be a person oblivious to any appreciation for all that's saccharine in its tenderness or one who awoke with the knowledge of the length of days and all that can be done inside of them - the bursts of glowing bones and faces, the cat calls to the cosmos cutting us some slack, the living still remember that that's what they're doing, the dying knowing that they've got some left inside of them and the circumstances of everything serving as tinder for the improvement and discovery of more where that came from.