Lives Wisely is a benign collection of love songs written in a period spanning pre-motherhood while living in Rome and ending in post-pandemic Britain.
The modern world doesn’t intrude very much except perhaps for You Give Silence a Bad Name which is about the habit of ghosting in a business setting.
There is more than a little of a ‘hello birds, hello sky’ character to this set of eleven songs. Lewis is apt to use affected phrases like “The colour of my universe just changed” (Ordinary)
The album ends incongruously with an overly glossy cover of John Prine’s sublime Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.
What will be charmingly nice for some will be disarmingly twee for others.
