[Editor’s Note: Sonata Sessions are produced independent of HearNebraska.org by Nickolai Hammar, and we’re proud to premiere them. Enjoy.]

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Somewhere in the upper echelons of songwriting craft, there’s probably a rung above smart ideas and and fret-to-fret ability where tasteful intuition reigns. As in, how to present an idea or a feeling, and then, like the most nail-biting game of Jenga, pick apart and amplify its core feelings. The way a mind does when it’s firing.

In deft finger-picking style, Rachel Tomlinson Dick (as her new solo project Miniature Horse) exhibits a kind of playing on her blue Danelectro that’s both vulnerable and dangerous. Not unlike, by the way, her guitar work on the new Hers record, Youth Revisited.

In “North Wind,” Tomlinson Dick ultimately touts a kind of self-reliance, but not without its tumults, most notably a last-third solo that sees taut picking charred into a scuzzy solo. It’s those raw moments of surprise that make the lyric “I’m my own sure thing” seem like a holistically earned conclusion, a song that’s embattled within itself about whether any such “sure thing” could ever be.

Here’s Miniature Horse in a new installment of Sonata Sessions:

https://vimeo.com/110430165