What makes a home? What ensues from a woman’s decision to stay, after a lifetime spent journeying? The multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer, songwriter, and producer Alexis Marsh frames these intimate questions locationally and relationally in Midwest, her highly anticipated, self-produced sophomore album. Midwest bears the influences of Marsh’s Winnipeg roots, her career composing film scores in Los Angeles, and her current home in Cincinnati. It also emerged from breakage: following her lauded 2016 debut Looking for Knives, Marsh split from her partner, who had previously co-produced everything she composed. As such, Midwest tasked Marsh not only with playing guitar, bass, keyboard, winds, and vocals, but also with learning how to record, mix, and produce them. The result is a palimpsestic soundscape of longing, liberation, and lush ambivalence. Marsh’s fierce, glancing lyricism illuminates a narrator engaged in work both trustworthy and transgressive; the listener believes the reassurance that “I’m a librarian / putting away the book you wrote,” then notes how her incantation “I’m a steady hand” might just “be sent into the debris to pull you down.” Marsh is a shrewd political being who writes “my body is screaming” from the backdrop of a purple state, post-Roe America, chosen motherhood, and the embedded patriarchy even of “liberal” cities. In Midwest’s fearlessness toward complexity, paradox, and reinvention, Marsh locates her own. - Laura Goode