Julia Cumming goes back to therapy, Dolly Parton in hand

"Mom, I'm Going Back To Therapy" frames returning to therapy as a big decision, the sort you'd bring a hard hat to. Julia Cumming delivers it seriously across two minutes forty-five of country-folk, and the joke works because the writing beneath it confesses something that isn't funny.

Cumming sings and plays bass in Sunflower Bean, the Brooklyn trio she joined back in 2013. Her solo debut, Julia, arrived before that, and a few months ago she contributed to Wolf Alice's Roches cover. The single is out via Partisan, and it marks a different role from the one she has with the band.

She penned the lyric following a book of Dolly Parton's lyrics. What she drew from Parton, she says, is a style so honest that sorrow and tongue-in-cheekness can occupy one line and make it cut deeper. The comparison she arrives at is therapy as a coal mine, a good joke and a genuine confession simultaneously.

Beneath it lies the dread of improving. Cumming has stated she feared recovery would bring a hollowness worse than the hurt, since at least the hurt belonged to her. Country-folk is the proper vessel for that: the style has always allowed a singer to voice the most terrible thing in the room and grin while doing so.

It's for those who followed her out of Sunflower Bean, and for anyone who enjoys a country song that doesn’t sugarcoat its subject. If you're after the trio's noise, this isn't it.

The setup bears much of the burden at 2:45. That coal-mine thread is the entire frame, and the runtime leaves no space to complicate it. If it fails to land, not much else here will.

Even so, it shows up with more attitude than most tracks manage. A 3.5: exact when it matters, and finished before it overstays.

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