Sometimes a song is more than just a song. Sometimes a song can be a mirror to the world, or to the hidden selves we are or want to be.

Lily Kershaw’s debut album, Midnight In The Garden, explores emotional landscapes and heart clutching melodies that say the unsaid things we struggle to say ourselves. The album takes root in the titans of folk music…those classic songsmiths who weave tapestries of sound with fingerpicking and tales of often unspoken truths.

In song, Kershaw is an old soul, but in person, she’s a kinetic 22 year-old, a “nearly life-long Los Angeleno,” she says. She’s ebullient and lively, quick with a joke and an infectious smile. Raised adjacent to the Hollywood machine, Kershaw offers an antidote to the long-mythologized Los Angeles glitz; she’s authentic, and honest, self-effacing and, above all, she is herself. She may not tell you this, but she’s conduit, a nexus of the experiences of the world around her. She feels the weight of the world, she says, but through song, she wears it as an emblem of who she is. Like the day-glow dreams of Los Angeles noir, she reveals the darkness that coexists with sunshine.

“It’s all about death,” she laughs, while describing her music. “I’d love to say most of my music isn’t about death or heartbreak but, well, it is.”

It comes as no surprise then, that in 2012, her single “As It Seems” provided the backdrop to the long-running CBS drama series, Criminal Minds. Her voice lilts and flows, as the guitar leans gently into minor keys, and she sings:

Well I knew what I didn’t want to know,

and I saw where I didn’t want to go,

So I took the path less travelled on,

And I’ll let my stories be whispered when I’m gone.

The song caught fire, broadcast around the world. “People wrote to me saying, ‘This is the song I want to play at my funeral,’ it was unsettling at first,” she says, “but it felt good to know that my song connects with people.”

Almost a year later, her song “Ashes Like Snow” appeared on the show with similar effect, wrapping audiences up in the meandering piano and her skyward arcing vocals. It was a song born from serendipity, nearly ten years in the making. “One day when I was at my parents house,” she says “I found this poem that I had written right at the time of the September 11 attacks, when I was just a young kid. I took some of those words and added the perspective from where we are today, in the long aftermath of war and struggle, looking back.”

Kershaw is a compulsive creator, she jots down melodies and lyrics as she’s wandering through her days. She sings melodies into her phone while sitting in traffic or secretly hums a tune into a voice recorder while out at shows, capturing any inspiration that she can channel back into her music. Her debut layers lush instrumentation over the stark skeleton of her sketches, sauntering between swaying somberness and playful uplifting anthems. Like the subtle beauty of a black rose, Kershaw’s music shores melancholy with a sense of hope and catharsis. And like she sings, her stories — her songs — are whispers or echoes, messages in bottles, cast out into the world.

“We’re not ones to shy away from rock and roll cliches, we’re embracing them.” says The Meanwhile lead singer/guitar player Brian McDonnell. “I mean, it’s really all been done, right? When Ozzy bit the head off that dove, that was pretty much the final chapter. From then on, it’s all just been a rehash of the same old shit.”

Apparently, the Chicago based guitar-rock quartet is either too jaded or too lazy to explore new territory on their way to the rock and roll middle. Sounding like the exact sum of their musical influences, The Meanwhile manages to blend rock, pop, alt-country, punk, garage, disco, soul, new-wave, grunge, metal, folk and jazz into the most bleached-white vanilla imaginable. It’s quite incredible that any 4 people with such respectable résumés and diverse influences could homogenize it all into something so.. um… ordinary.

Interestingly, it’s not like the band doesn’t have talent. Take bass player/back-up singer Eric Korte for example. His four-octave voice and three-octave bass drive half of The Meanwhile rhythm section. You might think his ability to hit notes that only a canine can hear (both vocally and on bass) would underpin the foundation of a very special band, but you’d be sadly mistaken.

The same is true for percussionist James DeFrain. With a past that includes a stint as a high-wire drummer for a now-defunct traveling circus (law suits pending), DeFrain’s inventive beats, on paper, should propel this band into the stratosphere. Unfortunately, they do not.

“Why should I play another note when I’m not done with this one?” says The Meanwhile lead guitar player Michael Paeth. The unconventional axe-slinger has been known to two-hand tap on a single note and routinely bends a C# up to… another C#. But even his fret board fury manages to somehow add absolutely nothing to The Meanwhile’s granola musical palate.

With vocal comparisons to the likes of Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Westerberg, lead singer Brian McDonnell has a voice that is completely fresh, simultaneously familiar and instantly forgettable. Why his vocals try so hard but add so little to The Meanwhile’s sound is a mystery that the band clearly doesn’t care to solve.

Whether The Meanwhile were clever enough to pick such a middle-of-the-road name on purpose is doubtful, but somehow the name manages to perfectly encompass everything, and nothing, that the band is about. The real question, and the one that begs the audience to further investigate The Meanwhile, is how long they can manage to be riders of the rock and roll coat tails. With this much talent and this many influences maybe The Meanwhile will one day burst their mediocrity bubble and blaze their own musical trail of melodic noise…. or maybe not.