The Mafia at Sixteen, and Everything After

The first thing Holly Miranda encountered when she landed in New York City at sixteen was the mafia. Men in dark suits appeared at her door late one evening, contract in hand, wanting very much for her to sign it. A lawyer with an intact conscience talked her out of it—the right outcome, since the alternative likely involved the Hudson River and something heavy attached to her ankles.

Instead she became the frontwoman of the Jealous Girlfriends, a Detroit band whose two records earned critical warmth without generating the audience that would have made that warmth matter commercially. When the band began to fracture, Miranda crossed paths with Dave Sitek—guitarist and producer behind TV on the Radio—who offered the specific, directed kind of encouragement that actually changes something. She went home, locked the door, and wrote.

The Magicians Private Library is the result, her first solo record. These are small, carefully made songs, each with its own interior logic and no interest in announcing itself. The whole thing has the quality of a room you wander into by accident and find you don’t particularly want to leave. It suits a slow evening with a glass of wine and the window open in a way that more ambitious records rarely manage.

There’s something in Miranda’s story worth holding onto—the image of a teenager in a doorway, some guy in a suit trying to purchase her future before she’d worked out what it was. A decade of the music industry being roughly that predatory followed. Then a locked room, and the songs that came out of it. She made exactly what she wanted.