Sometimes the best advice is to cut the bullshit and be yourself. Sound advice, perhaps, but not the easiest to follow. On her latest EP, Easy, French-American singer-songwriter Melissa Weikart searches for that elusive thing—the true, unfettered self—through glittering lullabies and searching ballads that take us on a cat-and-mouse chase through the working mind of an artist. Combining the lush, haunting piano arrangements she’s known for with a baroque-pop sensibility that calls to mind Lana Del Rey and Kate Bush, Easy is the masterful, probing work of a musician who refuses the expected and the obvious. 

 

“Go play, you’ll feel better,” Weikart has told herself, ever since 2017 debut EP Coffee and her follow-up album, Here, There (Northern Spy Records, 2022). She makes music to heal, airing out self-grievances and finding deeper answers to the riddles of life. Weikart has always been driven by an experimental ethos that shapes her hybrid approach to composition, but the looping, question-and-answer mentality that defines her arrangements often land simply, powerfully: “It opened in a way that I didn’t expect,” she sings on the closing track of Easy. “What can I say? It’s spring again . . .”

 

Born in Paris, the singer and keyboardist came up in Boston, until relocating to Strasbourg four years ago. Her music has since garnered national attention in France—she is the recipient of the Nancy Jazz emerging artist prize in 2022, and the Concours National de Jazz à la Défense instrumentalist prize. “There was a dissonance between these two cultures and how I conceived of the world,” she admits. It’s not surprising, then, that her music is singular and unusual, often marked by dissonant chords and layers of surreal, divinatory vocals. In Boston, she met the avant-garde pianist Ran Blake while studying at the New England Conservatory. “He taught me not to just fit into a particular style. Rather, to reflect on my inspirations and create my own musical setting,” she says. Weikart has done just this. Through multidisciplinary collaborations with composer Carla Kihlstedt and the left-field electropop of Biêm, her duo with DJ-producer Beatrice M., Weikart has immersed herself in a myriad of genres and aesthetics, so that with Easy, she returns to her roots, but with an elevated new sound, incorporating electronic beats and field recordings that remind of us just how far she’s traveled to get here. 

 

The result of her journey, on Easy, is striking: across six tracks, Weikart takes us along in her liberating approach to music. Her songs often begin with solo piano and voice before being sublimated by layers of sound. Improvisation may be her watchword, but these songs are nonetheless inflected by the effortless euphoria of pop music, while treating her audience to constant wonder and surprise. This is one of the reasons why Weikart is a live artist. “I love presenting an initial, unassuming melody and then subverting it, gently,” she says. Able to evoke love in “all its kitschiness and fragility” and to claim the voice as a true instrument, Melissa Weikart displays all her finesse and delicacy in a work that will delight hearts, at every moment, without you expecting it.