The Weepies. Hideaway

When they released their sparkling debut LP, Say I Am You, in 2006, California folk-pop duo the Weepies were readily embraced by everyone from Snow Patrol, who nominated them for a Shortlist Music Prize, to Mandy Moore, who invited them to collaborate on her album Wild Hope, to soundtrack supervisors for movies and TV shows (including, of course, Grey’s Anatomy). It’s a level of success that, in these ADD-addled days, a young indie-oriented act typically achieves only once. But Hideaway suggests the Weepies’ Deb Talan and Steve Tannen will have us crying with joy for some time to come. The new album is at once mellower and more provocative than Say I Am You, nearly every song a gently jangling, dusky invitation for self-reflection, more winsome than weepy thanks to the pair’s dulcet, dovetailing vocals.

Talan and Tannen, who married in 2007, spent a year on Hideaway, holed up alone together after a wearying promotional stint for Say I Am You; the album wasn't the only benefit of their seclusion — the couple has since had a child. Happy times, to be sure, but the message on Hideaway is that things won’t be great all the time. “Even the stars sometimes fade to gray,” they sing on the title track. Lucky for us, the Weepies aren’t afraid of the dark: “Walk on, walk on, walk on,” they coax on “Can’t Go Back Now.” With Hideaway as a kind of refuge if we need it, some of us might even be able to take their advice.