Boston Globe, May 11, 2012

NEW YORK — There are lots of birds in the lyrics of Morley, the singer-songwriter who’s found an original place for herself at the intersection of the jazz, folk, funk, and world-music scenes here, and who flits between these worlds with the grace and ease of the winged creatures that her songs often describe.

The brand-new “Undivided” — her fourth album, and the first she’s made entirely independently, financing and producing it herself, with a lavish roster of top-flight New York musicians participating — has birds passing overhead early and often.

On the first track, “On My Way,” a love song both contemplative and swelling with energy, “silver birds fly into the sun/ while one man grabs a paintbrush, the other grabs a gun.” “To Begin Again,” a meditation on death and renewal, addresses a “little bird on high/ you are wise.”

Much of Morley’s lyrical imagery is naturalistic; her themes are confessional and concerned for humanity; her energy is personal, earnest. Over breakfast at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village, she reminds one of the folk singers of the 1960s who once thrived on Bleecker Street and in Washington Square Park, just blocks away.

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