That old adage “it takes a village” is, quite literally, what made it possible for Courtney Hartman to make her latest album With You, a soft study of motherhood and all the beautiful and harrowing ways it upends a life. Hartman did what might be the hardest thing a new mom can do: she asked for help, surrounding herself with a community of fellow musician mothers. Collaborators and friends were all too happy to lend hands or a few bucks or their voices, making With You a true labor (pun intended) of love.
With You listens that way, like a safe haven for the deep mining of all the parts of a self that show up in pregnancy and postpartum. Some of Hartman’s epiphanies are well-trod territory—birth and motherhood and the myriad ways they transform a person—but there are also surprises, like the many different shapes “mothering” can take along its wide spectrum, and how this has informed her own experience of it.
