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“So see here. Mia Doi Todd is a folk singer. She plays the acoustic guitar with skill and care…She does her best to sing clearly and sonorously, and succeeds wildly: her voice, quite deep for a woman, fills up a room like a gorgeous, thick fog. Finally, she writes almost uncomfortably direct songs about love and pain and what it feels like to look inside her heart, and what she finds in there when she does. Manzanita, after a week in the CD player — during which week I found myself wanting to hear it more often than pretty much anything else in the house — strikes me as something of a masterpiece. Its textures are rich but unprepossessing; all the musicians competent, expressive, but austere; it is a very even-keeled affair. The darker moments ("The Way," "Muscle, Bone & Blood") don't try to frighten you; they just remind you that intimacy is difficult, sometimes so hard that we wouldn't dare it if loneliness didn't seem even worse. In so doing, they accomplish something rather more impressive than just spilling their guts and howling about the mess they've made. Listening, I'm reminded that Ozu's films are at least as good as Kurosawa's; I am absorbed into incredibly personal narratives. I am stunned, finally, into speechlessness by the nakedness of Todd's lyrics; many try but almost none succeed at writing verses as surgically unadorned as: “It's getting late. We had better head back./We could stop and get some dinner./There's a full moon rising, the stars are aligned./We could spend the night together./What if we do?” or “Alone again, I hope to find/a greater kindness, peace of mind,/a faith, a joy in my core./I head for some unknown shore.” or, most remarkably to me, in four lines so elegant that it's hard to slow one's reading down enough to really drink in just how good they are: “I am a human being./I'm made of muscle, bone and blood./I'm full of awesome feelings/like unconditional love.”

I imagine that some folks reading this will find some of the above corny; each to his own, I suppose. But so many people — so many! — have lately expressed a liking for music that aims at articulating the raw truths of the heart. I would hazard a guess that nobody will hit the mark quite so truly as Manzanita does…And the voice — the voice! You can expect people to haul out the Joni Mitchell comparisons when reviewing it; forgive them. It's just that they haven't ever actually heard anything like Manzanita, so they're grasping at straws. Seek it out and see for yourself. She is really something special.” --John Darnielle, Last Plane to Jakarta