Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano Builds a Monument to Life’s Enchanting Beauty
The singer/songwriter's third LP is her best and brightest endeavor yet

I am a purveyor of many musical tapestries, but none move me at a consistent clip quite like the corners where instrumental and ambient compositions hangout. It’s not the schematics of twinkling, airy movements or the wordless beauty curdled into natural textures that set me adrift; it’s the idea that something so against-the-grain of modern musicality—especially two-minutes of a few notes interchanging atop atmospheric backing loops—can give you a brand new language to face your next day with. To sit with Gia Margaret’s latest LP—Romantic Piano—is to give yourself that gift of newness. Every song scratches a once-unknowable itch; every sequence tumbles blissfully into the next. It’s a dearly beautiful exercise in complexity.
The story goes that Margaret—a Chicago artist whose talents cross over into every known ether—lost her voice shortly after releasing her debut album There’s Always Glimmer four years ago. To lose access to your instrument, I can only imagine what kind of trauma that might bring on top of an already insurmountable sequence of damage. But Margaret—while on vocal rest—kept going, making Mia Gargaret: A rich, breathtaking project that found her processing and reckoning with her own grief through synths, loops and sampling. The soft, choral voice she’d once placed so deftly at the center of all of her work was now silent.
I very much enjoyed There’s Always Glimmer, but it feels like that part of Margaret’s artistry is currently on the backburner. When a musician makes a pivot as immense as hers, it wouldn’t be fair to compare apples and oranges. Mia Gargaret, on the other hand, felt like a one-of-a-kind risk. It was an act of creative and emotional survival, and now it has become a piece of Margaret’s world she is not interested in letting go of just yet. So now, we have this document—this concerto—of clicks, chirps and blurs. It is at once Margaret’s greatest and most-resoundingly hopeful effort yet.
Romantic Piano was engineered predominantly by Sean O’Keefe, while Margaret mixed and produced much of it alongside Yoni Wolf. Employed across the album are, as Margaret calls them, field recordings of nature that delight in unison with the pianos, horns, drums, bass and vocals she and her peers plug into throughout the 12-song, 27-minute run-time. Perhaps the greatest part of Romantic Piano‘s makeup is how human all of it sounds. Much akin to the recent, swelling trend of artists recording their albums in a live headspace—in hopes of harnessing what an on-stage energy might look like on tape—Margaret catches all of the imperfections happening concurrently—whether it’s a crackle of house foundation of a street growing busy—and fashions everything into an immersive nebula of DIY ethos. At its core, Romantic Piano is a perfect love-letter from Margaret about embracing the instrument she turned to when her voice couldn’t continue. But by no means is her piano-playing merely a second option in the wake of change. No, no. By the tracklist’s end, Romantic Piano morphs into the opus of someone whose talents and vision could give a crack of lightning a run for its money.
The album opens with “Hinoki Wood,” a serene stroke of repetition and layering. A single note hums in the background, as Margaret’s piano chords form a progression as restrained as a television commercial jingle. It’s upbeat—as much as a sub-two-minute song can be—but what’s wonderful about “Hinoki Wood” is that you can hear the creaks of Margaret’s ivories as she presses them. “Cicadas” exudes fragments of Jon Brion’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-era whimsicality, with dial tone notes dueting with rib clicks from actual cicadas. Ever so nimbly, you can hear a moaning floorboard, or the wince of a screen door closing.
“Ways of Seeing” is one of my personal highlights, as you hear the crunching noises of someone walking through a pile of leaves. This song is the proper introduction to what Romantic Piano gnaws at: the very natural, organic textures of everyday life that are present and beating and breathing across our orbits. And as such, they are present in these sonic moments, too. Margaret’s piano doesn’t take any one specific direction, as if she’s sitting on the bench and flexing her fingers atop the ivories ever so gently. On “Juno,” the synths’ sounds transform into a dainty horn section, while blinking digits pulse ever so vibrantly atop Margaret’s light, high-octave treble.