Ian Anderson, editor of the late English folk/world-music magazine fRoots, once voiced the suspicion that it is becoming the birthright of every American to be a singer-songwriter. He meant, I took it, that if you are an American of a certain age you may be a singer-songwriter unless you can prove otherwise. As evidence for that proposition Josie Bello offers the sort of music that frequently finds its way through the postal service to my front porch and awaits my review.

Please understand this is nothing personal. From the evidence of what one hears here, Bello is a decent and kind-hearted human being whom, if you met her, you would like. She is also talented, at least up to the point where it comes to putting original lyrics to melodies. She has a warm voice, the acoustic arrangements are serviceable, and the tunes are listenable. And of course there's no law against taking your self-penned songs out to the public, nor should there be. At the same time there's no law that says the rest of us are obliged to listen to them.

Resilience is at once autobiographical and political. That's fine if that's what you're looking for. Still, it's not a good idea to open your album with the words "bird on a wire," which immediately declares one not very unimaginatively chosen source of inspiration (that's Leonard Cohen, if you've been living under a rock). I'm sure, moreover, that it was not her intention to expose the uncomfortable distance between her approach and Cohen's unique world-class gift.

It also tells us that her listening is not all that deep, no doubt one reason her writing is often awkward. The title song is full of clunky lines ("Give me the space I need," "Your assumption is based on randomness," and much more). While admirably intentioned, her social-justice songs tend to consist of irritatingly familiar slogans set to music. I concur with all of their sentiments, but that's not the issue.

Many years ago, in an interview that has stuck in memory, Bob Dylan complained that when he would go to a club to hear someone billed as a "folk singer," the act would turn out to be a singer-songwriter. To his credit the interviewer observed that if anyone was responsible for that, it was Dylan himself. To his credit Dylan conceded the point. In that regard Bello's song "Coffee Shop Open Mic" reminds me why I stay out of coffee shops with open mics: the performers, practically none of whom have done more than listen to other singer-songwriters, are boring and illiterate. To learn how to write songs, as Dylan also says, you need first to familiarize yourself with old folk ballads and proceed from there. Only a relative handful in the folk (or "Americana") world should be doing what they do, namely their own material more or less solely, any more than everybody should be writing books, creating architecture, or practicing auto mechanics. Not in public anyway.

[ visit Josie Bello's website ]