Lauren Watkins : If I’m Being Honest Review

by Shannon Smith

Lauren Watkins’ If I’m Being Honest makes complicated feelings easy to understand. Watkins spends much of If I’m Being Honest working through that expression. Across twelve songs, she writes about romantic habits, changing desires, endings, hope, and the uncomfortable clarity that sometimes arrives only after an experience has run its course. The album’s strength is that Watkins rarely needs to overexplain any of it.

The music gives complicated feelings legible shapes. Familiar country progressions, acoustic guitars, pedal steel, direct melodies, and steady grooves establish frames the listener can immediately understand. Inside them, Watkins and producer Will Bundy use changes in vocal phrasing, register, harmonic color, instrumental density, and backing-vocal arrangement to reveal what those apparently simple surfaces contain. Joey Moi contributes co-production on select tracks, while the overall sound keeps Watkins and the songwriting at the center.

“Heartbreakaholic” sets the mood with a pedal steel and acoustic instrumentation sitting inside a medium-slow country-rock pulse. Watkins approaches the eighth-note subdivision with an easy rhythmic looseness. The harmonic vocabulary is similarly familiar, built largely around I, IV, and V, with movement toward the relative minor providing contrast. The song does not need unusual harmonic machinery to make its point because much of its character emerges through what happens inside the singing and lyrics.

Watkins is especially effective at supplying details vocally. Her relaxed country inflection can sound conversational one moment and carefully shaped the next. Descending melodic gestures acquire glissandos, trills, and small resolutions; sustained notes become connections between phrases rather than endpoints. As “Heartbreakaholic” develops, the arrangement behaves similarly. Palm-muted electric-guitar figures appear in one side of the soundstage, sustained guitar tones answer from another, and backing vocals gradually broaden the texture. When Watkins moves into her upper register around the bridge and breakdown, the song has accumulated enough surrounding activity for the lift to register naturally.

The balance between accessibility and detail becomes even clearer on “Convenient.” An electric guitar introduces a descending legato figure while acoustic strumming establishes an easygoing foundation. Watkins begins comparatively low and rhythmically, giving the verse a more staccato character. The pre-chorus stretches her phrasing before the chorus opens into a higher, more legato melodic shape.

The sections are easy to recognize partly because Watkins sings each one differently. Her technique remains understated: a held note may connect to another through a glissando, a small trill, or simply a smooth legato transition. Harmonic color contributes as well, particularly in the sound of major chords separated by a whole step, while the bridge introduces a more active syncopated ensemble figure. Guitars, pedal steel, bass, drums, and vocal layers continually alter their degree of activity without disturbing the song’s continuity.

“Daydreams” is the album’s sole Watkins-only composition, it provides a particularly direct view of her writing. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar establishes the song’s intimate scale, with bass movement, light pedal steel, and background voices providing direction without crowding the lead vocal. Watkins remains relaxed in her lower register, but her dynamic shaping becomes important to the melody. When she digs into a phrase, the country edge of her voice becomes more pronounced; when the line relaxes, the legato quality returns.

There is meaningful construction underneath that ease. Changes in harmonic rhythm distinguish sections, while bass movement gives the progression a sense of destination. Movement into the relative minor provides contrast, and an ascending internal motive gradually widens as the song builds. The arrangement eventually recedes again, leaving light guitar and Watkins’ wordless vocal figure at the end.

The sparseness of “Daydreams” therefore exposes rather than eliminates musical information. With fewer competing layers, the relationship among harmonic pacing, melodic shape, vocal dynamics, and accompaniment becomes easier to hear. The song demonstrates that Watkins is able to generate development through small changes that become consequential.

“Better Love Next Time” places Watkins in a familiar harmonic environment. Its I–vi–IV–V movement and pop-country backbeat create immediate forward motion. The rhythm has an almost leisurely gait, not a walking bass in the jazz sense, but a steady bodily one-two motion that keeps the song traveling without pushing it.

The arrangement becomes part of the emotional argument. Additional instruments enter as the song progresses, backing vocals expand the choruses, and male and female voices create a broader collective sound around Watkins. Particularly effective is the contrary motion in the vocal parts leading toward the chorus. Separate lines can move independently while still serving the same destination.

That is an apt musical analogue for the song’s perspective. “Better Love Next Time” does not need to pretend that disappointment was insignificant in order to imagine something better afterward. The arrangement accumulates energy toward the climax, while the repeated idea of “better next time” supplies its emotional destination. Then the production releases that energy, returning to a more basic beat and reduced instrumentation.

Across these songs, Watkins’ strongest quality is candor. However, it is her ability to determine which musical details allow plain language to retain emotion, personality, and movement.

Her voice carries much of that responsibility. There is enough country character to identify the language immediately, but she seldom depends on exaggerated mannerisms. Glissandos, trills, register shifts, dynamic changes, and rhythmic adjustments animate melodies without making the performances feel decorated for their own sake. The arrangements follow the same principle. Acoustic guitar and pedal steel establish continuity with country tradition, while electric guitars, backing vocals, bass, drums, and contemporary production expand or contract according to what each section needs.

That balance also helps explain why If I’m Being Honest can spend so much time around heartbreak without remaining trapped inside it. The album is increasingly interested in what becomes visible once emotional distance develops: recognizing a recurring romantic pattern, understanding why convenience is not the same thing as connection, discovering that an old ambition no longer describes everything you want, or believing an ending can make a better relationship possible.

Those realizations do not require Watkins to abandon familiar country forms. They depend on her knowing what to do within them. A progression establishes the ground; a melodic inflection changes the meaning of a phrase. A backing vocal enlarges an emotional moment. Harmonic motion redirects it. An arrangement accumulates until the feeling becomes unavoidable and then knows when to withdraw.

That is where the title If I’m Being Honest acquires greater significance. Honesty here is about clarification. Watkins takes experiences that resist easy answers and gives them musical forms clear enough for the listener to follow the thinking taking place inside them. The familiar foundations provide orientation; the details tell us what those feelings actually contain.

To enjoy the album’s central theme is not to place to much focus on simplicity. It is legibility. Watkins makes complicated feelings understandable by giving each one a clear musical frame and then trusting phrasing, harmony, arrangement, and performance to preserve everything inside it that remains unresolved.  If I’m Being Honest uses clarity to give complexity somewhere to speak.