Della Mae is back with joyous, soul-affirming music. Grammy award-winning banjoist Alison Brown produces and plays on Magic Accident, the band’s first album for Compass Records and their first since 2021’s Family Reunion. The songs on Magic Accident embraces the complexity of life while celebrating the glimmers of hope and love shining through sometimes challenging moments.
The album opens with Celia Woodsmith’s crystalline lead vocals soaring on the title track, driven the call and response of her crisp guitar picking and Kimber Ludiker’s sparkling mandolin runs and fueled by Brown’s banjo and Ludiker’s fiddle. In a letter from her younger self to her future self, Woodsmith ponders her journey of self-discovery, as swelling harmony vocals on the refrain testify that “I’m just as holy as the great divide/I’m just a small piece/Of the great mystery/I don’t need to question/Any of my life.” The transportive “My Own Highway,” a testimony about going one’s own way in life, unfurls with exquisite a cappella harmonies, unwrapping glittering layers of instrumentation that cascade below the band’s harmonies.
