A few years ago, a tow-truck driver in Texas asked Caila Thompson-Hannant a seemingly simple question: “Do you wanna be big in music?” But the D.I.Y.-bred Montreal artist was taken aback. “I honestly could not answer him,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It kinda shook me, and I thought a lot about it mostly because I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted.”
After playing in offbeat art-rock bands like Shapes and Sizes and Think About Life, Thompson-Hannant went solo as Mozart’s Sister in 2011. Ever since, the dance-pop project has been a conduit for her zany, freewheeling impulses as a songwriter and producer. And with her second album, more than ever, she’s prioritizing her endearing peculiarity over any sort of run at stardom.
Field of Love is an obvious lurch forward from her debut, which at times had Thompson-Hannant coddling some of her quirks in appeasing, indistinct production. By contrast, the instrumentation on the new record is daring, aggressively bubbly, and sharp. As an extension of her love-buzzed lyrics, which can turn from schmoopy to demented in a single line, Thompson-Hannant’s voice has always been unhinged: whooping, cooing breathily, even intoning baby sounds. The beats she’s produced on Field of Love, meanwhile, flirt with unabashed garishness and fully match the whimsy of her vocal theatrics like never before.
The first several songs on Field of Love set a fizzy tone, with lead-off track “Eternally Girl” pushing front-and-center synths that twinkle and plunk over tight, driving kicks. Here and throughout, Thompson-Hannant disarms with a suggestive charm, pre-ordaining an entire relationship from a pang of romance: “I could be the one that you love,” she sings in a soaring alto, before immediately promising, “I will be the one that you love.” It’s a song about feeling like a little girl in love and embracing that excitement instead of qualifying or suppressing it.
Through Mozart’s Sister, Thompson-Hannant has written about romance both fiercely and daintily—at turns and at once—often amplifying the heart’s whims rather than trivializing them. “The minute we sat down to dinner I knew,” she sings on “Moment 2 Moment,” explaining how a new couple didn’t even need to order drinks before adding, “you know how rare that is.” For all her aggressive vulnerability, Thompson-Hannant sometimes drops the sentimentality for a colder edge. On “Plastic Memories,” a tweaked-out and pounding dance track, she compartmentalizes a breakup in order to leave it behind, hushing, “Happy goes away, so does the pain.” On the same song she leans in and chants savagely, “I am a death messenger, things that have happened are gone.” It’s a jarring, fist-pump-worthy epiphany, a promise to live in the moment.
Toward the end of the album, “My Heart Is Wild” reprises an originally stunted song called “My House Is Wild” that first appeared on Thompson-Hannant’s 2014 debut LP, Being. The original covered up a sincere invitation with clunky industrial production, but “My Heart Is Wild” peels down to the core of the song—Thompson-Hannant’s voice, which she samples, triggers, and unleashes with giddy hope. The new version sounds less guarded, like she’s singing and dancing manically about love at a wide-open sky instead of to a dark, throbbing dancefloor. It’s the same effect she nurses throughout Field of Love, doubling down on her gut whims, newly confident. The record reads like a manifesto—a pronouncement that anxiety and empowerment can dovetail, that vulnerability can be menacing, and, of course, that love can be infectiously weird.
