All Things Will Unwind is the third, stunning offer from Detroit based experimental pop chanteuse-My Brightest Diamond, aka Shara Worden. Known for her many colloborations with indie rock royalty as well as her extraordinary original material, Worden is coming into her own as an artist and human on this 11 song recording. At once accessible and intelligent, the songs were written exclusively for celebrated chamber ensemble yMusic (Bon Iver, Antony & the Johnsons, The New York Philharmonic & Rufus Wainwright) and they are featured on each track.

“We Added it Up” opens the record with a punchy, almost Ragtime acoustic guitar, suggesting Cabaret by way of Carolina. Worden’s voice, ever mesmerizing, dances between the notes in a clever narrative of love’s opposites, then joins a rousing call and response chorus on the song’s finale. The range of influences on All Things Will Unwind are as eclectic as its’ author, but listeners will recognize hints of Roberta Flack, Regina Specktor, Edith Piaf and Antony & The Johnsons throughout the album. Inspired by becoming a mother, chats with legendary performance artist Laurie Anderson, presidential addresses, and class warfare, Worden is metabolizing her influences as only she can- with playful, profound originality.

Since recording My Brightest Diamond’s critically acclaimed sophomore album A Thousand Shark’s Teeth, Shara has returned to Detroit, where she grew up in a family of musical evangelists. She is drawing inspiration from the motor city’s unique struggles. On “High Low Middle” Worden takes us to the center of Detroit’s unemployment crisis, in a catchy, vaudevillian protest song that would make Woodie Guthrie proud:

Righteous heathen

Blinded and seein

You’re next you’re before

You’re pompous you are poor

Your hungry yet strangely your working like crazy


All Things Will Unwind is a picture of an artist maturing; considering joy and pain, beauty and horror, yet bravely standing in the tension between the two- and singing about it. The record closes with “I Have Never Loved Someone” and finds Shara dipping into her soothing alto, singing to her newborn son; the pedals of the pump organ creak under the vocal, evoking visions of a cradle gently rocking:


I have never loved someone the way I love you

I have never seen a smile like yours

And if you grow up to be king or clown or pauper,

I will say you are my favorite one in town


Yet even in a lullaby, one that could easily be a classic, Shara is still Shara:

And when I grow to be a poppy in the graveyard

I will send you all my love upon the breeze

And if the breeze won’t blow your way

…I will find some other way to tell you, you’re ok


She closes the album repeating you’re ok, against the swell of an angelic choir, assuring her son, herself, and the listener- in this world of opposites “ok” – like this remarkable album-is a well-earned triumph.