Esther Bennett describes Home Is Where the Art Is as a ‘labour of love’ and, cliché that that phrase has become, on this occasion the term does not appear misapplied or unmerited. Both the labour (intensive, sustained work) and the love (profound emotional content) are in evidence throughout, but there’s such facility in the delivery and skill in the blending of heterogeneous musical materials that it all breezes by (it is quite a short album at under 35 minutes). ‘Rio de Janeiro Blue’ is a coolly longing-filled cover of a track from Randy Crawford’s Secret Combination. It’s swiftly followed by ‘Suppose’, a performance of a poem written by Bennett’s mother for her father and given to the singer after her mother’s death.
Spoken, then sung, to a piece of hauntingly spacy music by Didier Messidoro, it’s a gently devastating distillation of a highly personal network of emotions and memories. Bennett recounts the musical history of her home city over another Messidoro composition on ‘My Birmingham’, blends Billy Strayhorn and Amy Winehouse on ‘Lush Life Medley’, and pays tribute to her father on the tenderly extraordinary ‘The Maintenance Fitter’ – labour and love – before finally drawing proceedings to a close with a laidback cover of ‘You Go to My Head’.
