MANDY MERCIER Singer In A Roadhouse Band - Review by John Conquest, 3rd Coast Music (Wild Cantinas – 4-stars) Many years ago—has to be, because it’s been decades since I last read a copy—Rolling Stone ran a letter from a reader responding to a negative review of a Laura Nyro album, which ended up advising the writer never to set foot in New York—“Ms Nyro has friends here.” As the Austin Chronicle’s Jim Caligiuri discovered the hard way after he a wrote a negative review of Mandy Mercier’s Run Out Of Darkness (Wild Cantinas, 2007), Ms Mercier has friends here. In fact, among those friends are the many other Austin Chronicle writers who’ve lavished praise, over the two decades she’s been an Austin fixture, on her “piston-pounding pipes and fleet fiddle fingers,” as Christopher Gray once wrote in the same paper. In fairness to Caligiuri, who has the dubious distinction of being the only writer to trash a Jimmy LaFave album, while I share Bill Passalacqua’s perplexity as to why the Chronicle gives him certain assignments and why he accepts them, I will concede that Mercier’s vocals are something of an acquired taste, but the point he missed is that what so many musicians and music lovers love and admire about her is the total commitment, the way she gives it everything she’s got, holding nothing back. With Mercier, it’s as much about heart as art. Her latest album is a kind of ‘Greatest Hits’ collection which takes its title from a song that originally appeared on a long ago cassette and includes some tracks from an even earlier one made in California before she moved to Austin, but while the sequencing isn’t chronological, it works just fine. Of the 15 cuts, only three are covers, Blaze Foley’s Picture Cards Can’t Picture You, featuring Champ Hood on fiddle, and, from a 1994 KUT Live Set featuring Danny Young on rubboard, Bessie Smith’s Got Me Goin’ and Calvin Russell’s Eight Ball, the rest being well chosen selections from her songbook, peaking with Beautiful World, also featuring Hood, which ranks up there with Lucinda Williams’ best work. —JC "Fiery Lone Star chanter -- tightly whipped blues and particularly choice country rock -- she's been called a petite keg of dynamite, Mandy Mercier, an Austin, Texas expatriate who was consistently, positively drooled over in her hometown press" – LA Weekly "Like her peer, Lucinda Williams, Mandy Mercier's stock in trade is songs of the heart -- broken or strong -- and she can deliver them with the kind of performance that stays with you long after the last note has faded" – Austin Chronicle "Dynamo Mandy Mercier . . . Wonderful, nonstop, Mandy Mercier . . . she plays with her entire body, and sings with her whole soul . . . The fans who spent the evening queing up breathlessly for Golden Smog or Liz Phair missed a bet . . . gravel and honey-voiced Mandy Mercier . . . sang sweetly as the lowriders and pickups that constitute South Austin's blue collar rush hour rumbled . . . who knows, maybe next year Mercier will be packin' 'em in and 8,000 people can claim they saw her . . . " – Austin American-Statesman