(Self-released, digital)
The plight of the singer-songwriter is to forever pluck away at their emotional wounds. These perpetual loners can be found pleading to passersby with little more than their guitar strings — and heartstrings — as accompaniment, an impulse that can only be pathological. Emitting warbly cadences as a testament to inner truths, singer-songwriters, like cockroaches, scavenge life’s interstices in the hopes of converting yesterday’s waste into fuel for tomorrow.
Burlington singer-songwriter and guitarist Danny LeFrancois’ latest album provides a window into such a psyche, and his is a closed-loop system where the modern-day troubadour tradition reigns supreme.
From unrequited love ditties with rip-roaring guitar solos to barroom ballads soused with colloquial sentiment, Mona Lisa’s Eyes Are Blue reveals a fully formed LeFrancois. Outfitted with the zero-effs kind of confidence that comes from facing yourself head-on, LeFrancois gains strength from the chemistry among the album’s core players — aka the Parts.
While Danny & the Parts features a rotating cast of musicians, the album’s core ensemble consists of Luke Awtry on bass — also credited with producing, engineering, mixing and mastering — and Matthew Jadin on drums, with cameos from trumpeter Connor Young and singer-songwriter Andriana Chobot, among others. LeFrancois wears a few hats himself, trading between guitar, harmonica and, comically apropos on a song titled “Daddy,” the glockenspiel.
Mona Lisa’s Eyes Are Blue opens with a jest of sorts, as LeFrancois teases his departure from “this little city” that’s got him “going insane” on “This Time Tomorrow.” In true train-song fashion, the choruses pine for what could be. Striking an emotional chord that’s more tortured than funny, the opener secures the album’s flair for nostalgia. The band put its own spin on the familiar trope with catchy stop-time breaks and a spunky harmonica solo that amplify the song’s ruefully romantic air. Still, at only a little more than two minutes long, “This Time Tomorrow” feels over before it begins, like a hot-air plume from the steam engine that’s just left the station sans you.
That atmospheric quality suffuses the whole album. While some lyric phrases evaporate incomprehensibly into the mix, LeFrancois’ most resonant lines reflect an affecting circularity that’s equal parts freeing and confining. That self-contradictory motif is in full effect on “G.O.D. (Grand Olde Duke)” as LeFrancois speak-sings: “As time floats by like a whip-poor-will / What the hell is a whip-poor-will / I feel no pain / It’s just another bad migraine.”
Lyrically, LeFrancois suspends the dreamlike atmosphere for a brass-tacks narrative in the high-energy song “Daddy.” It’s an underwhelming dose of reality, but the tambourine is tight AF — and the whole number makes me want to get behind the wheel and gun it to 88.
The album opens a window into LeFrancois’ sensibility over the course of its 10 tracks — I’m staying away from the outro poached from David Lynch’s surrealist playbook — and is purposefully left ajar, an invitation to settle in and stay a while. At his most vulnerable, the singer-songwriter confesses, “I wasted all my time here / Looking back / Ain’t never had a friend here / That’s a fact.”
Fact or poetic fiction, Mona Lisa’s Eyes Are Blue finds LeFrancois in good company, a sum total that is Danny & the Parts. Stream the album on all major platforms.
This article appears in Sep 17-23 2025.
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