Month: November 2019

Beauty in a Breakdown: Kalie Shorr has too much to say

.Reading time 8 minutes.

kalie shorr open book review

Kalie Shorr, a 25-year-old singer and songwriter from Portland, Maine, starts her first full-length album with something pitched halfway between a promise and a warning. “Don’t go asking questions that you don’t want answers to/ I’ve got too much to say, and I’ll tell it all to you,” she pledges, and it won’t take long for you to realize just how much she means it. She wrote the songs on Open Book— its very title a commitment to transparency— amidst the ruins of what she calls “the worst year,” one marked by romantic collapse, mental health struggles, and the sudden death of her sister. That’s an awful lot of hardship and tragedy packed into a small time frame, and the 13 songs on Open Book often sound like they’ve exploded from a pressure cooker; Shorr pulls no punches and spares no detail, documenting her year from hell with bracing candor, defiant jokes, narrative perspicuity, and persuasive psychoanalysis. “I don’t really like dating assholes/ But I do it ‘cause I have a weird relationship with my dad,” she admits in the opening couplet of “Gatsby,” fast-talking a few extra syllables into her meter, as if the song can barely contain the wild honesty of her lived experience. Over and over, Open Book lays it all on the table; it bursts at the seams. It sounds like nothing so much as the work of a gifted singer/songwriter who’s long had much to say, and can’t hold it in any longer.

Shorr is a country singer, though she’s never any more or less attached to genre tradition than she needs to be. Her version of roots music extends back no further than to the supercharged, chart-topping country of the 1990s, and Open Book is generously adorned with arena-filling drums, red-hot guitar licks, doleful pedal steel, and sawing fiddles. But if you want to triangulate her sound, you only have to go back as far as the previous generation’s great women of country: Shorr invites passing comparison to early Taylor Swift (for her diaristic clarity), Kacey Musgraves (for her attention to detail and her careful rendering of small-town life), perhaps even Miranda Lambert (for how she pivots so easily from hell-raising to introspection). But the active ingredient in her songwriting is an abiding love for cheap-sounding pop-punk and mopey emo, idioms that aren’t broadly fashionable but offer her a language for direct emotional appeal. The most irrepressible moments on Open Book come when she allows these reference points to mix and mingle. “The World Keeps Spinning,” a song for her sister, has weepy steel guitar and a bruised, blood-letting chorus. The perfectly-titled “Angry Butterfly,” where she announces herself “a ballerina wearing combat boots,” writhes and seethes in grungy dissonance, but it’s got gossamer banjo latticed on top.

You never feel like these songs are very far removed from personal experience, but that’s not to say they’re unvarnished journal entries, either. Shorr tempers her eagerness to share with immaculate songwriting formalism, and several of these songs come with the kind of pitch-perfect premises that your average country song-slinger would trade his best pickup truck and a full case of domestic beer for. Listen to “Messy,” about two neat-freaks who look down their noses at other couples who allow any imperfection or discord to show; the twist, of course, is that their immaculate surfaces hide an emotional shit show. “Thank God You’re a Man,” a swaggering song of seduction, picks up where Ariana Grande’s “God is a Woman” left off; it brims with the confidence of a woman who knows she can pull a few hallelujahs out of even the most resolute nonbeliever. Best of all is the righteously petulant breakup song “F U Forever,” a carbonated cocktail of honky-tonk twang and mall-rat thrash. It includes a few lyrics that any good psychotherapist would surely categorize as breakthroughs (“I’m just a mirror reflecting/ and you’re just an asshole projecting”), but the smartest thing about it is how Shorr saves her one epic profanity for an uproarious punchline.

Indeed, her songs are witheringly funny, except when they aren’t. Some of Open Book’s richest turns of phrase are mirthlessly clever, like a couplet from “The World Keeps Spinning” that perfectly captures the solitude of grief in a world of indifference: “I drove by a wedding on the way to your funeral/ I bet the bride was happy that the weather was beautiful.” The pounding “Lullaby,” written in the wake of a breakup, moves from consuming sadness to self-determination in the span of a single chorus (“I’m singing one last lullaby and I’m/ putting this to bed.”) Part of what makes these songs so compelling is the believability of Shorr’s self-appraisal; she plays some of her therapist’s-couch asides for laughs (“looks like my abandonment issues got the best of me again”), but many a truth is spoken in jest, and Shorr is unsparing in her assessment of how her year of tribulation turned into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Listen to the old-timey soft-shoe gait and and casual one-liners in “Gatsby,” a song about turning to self-destruction as a way to avoid facing down the demons within; Shorr delivers bleak lyrics from behind a shit-eating grin, which is the whole point. There’s no such performative zeal in “Escape,” which quietly offers the album’s most sobering turn; here Shorr chronicles various drugs of choice used to “sweeten up the lows” before admitting that her own defense mechanism is running away. It’s a harsh confession that belies the album’s confrontational spirit. Surely it’s no accident that Open Book ends with an antagonistic rager; in “Angry Butterfly,” Shorr’s crawled back from hell with a resolve forged in fire, ready to say her piece and possibly bust some skulls. Its tantalizing promise is that, for as much as she says on this album, she’s really just clearing her throat.

The Heart Off Guard: Joe Henry holds on to his hat

.Reading time 12 minutes.

the gospel according to water review

Joe Henry provides us with countless invaluable images across his new album, The Gospel According to Water. One of the most poignant is a scene from the title song, where the narrator sits at his windowsill and watches a procession of people parade by; each keeps their hat clutched tightly in hand, guarding against the fitful squall they know must come sooner or later. Henry takes it all in from behind a pane of glass, and sings with the quiet authority of a man who knows what it’s like to have the hat blown off his head. The Gospel According to Water is the 15th Joe Henry album, expanding a rich catalog of songs that reckon with blustery weather by all its various names— cruel fate, ravenous time, fickle providence, the slipstream of mystery. It is also the first Joe Henry album to arrive following a blindsiding cancer diagnosis late last year, each of these 13 songs written in the aftermath of the big shoe’s drop. A cruder man might say that shit’s gotten real, but with Henry there is always a deep reserve of eloquence. “Shadows lead us onward/ the darkness still at play,” he offers in a song called “Mule.” He’s been writing for years about how the dark itself proves a guiding light, how struggle is the mustard seed from which hope springs— and now he’s left with no choice but to believe it. Perhaps it is right to say that these new songs are similar in kind but different in clarity to the songs that came before them; that they hover over familiar concerns but exert a new kind of gravity. They’re songs forged in the refiner’s fire. They’re the sound of rubber meeting the road.

Refinement is a good way to think of this album, though that’s more a matter of happenstance than intention. The entirety of The Gospel According to Water was recorded quick-and-dirty in just two days’ time, initially meant to be a data dump for Henry’s publisher. It wasn’t until he listened back that Henry realized the lucidity with which these recordings speak, the lack of any need for additional polish. They are released here more or less as-is, though anyone expecting the jagged edges of, say, Springsteen’s Nebraska will want to check their assumptions at the door: These songs are beautiful and deep, autumnal in their tone and unhurried in their pace, and they all sound crisp, clean, and complete. The biggest tell to the serendipitous nature of these sessions is the absence of drummer Jay Bellerose, long a fixture of the Joe Henry players; you won’t hear any of his rolling thunder here, but you will hear fleet-fingered acoustic guitar lines from Henry and from John Smith; sparkling piano work from Patrick Warren; understated melodies from reed man Levon Henry, whose smoky sax and clarinet wind through a handful of songs. On two selections, you’ll hear harmonies from the unassailable Birds of Chicago, summoning rapturous soul. There is some of the same loose, brambly spirit that characterized Henry’s previous record, 2017’s feral Thrum, but this one is decidedly less prickly and more serene; the kind of quiet that commands active attention and full engagement.

Ever since Reverie, Henry’s songwriting has moved further from folk traditions and closer to poetic ones, meaning his lyrics aren’t necessarily linear so much as they are impressionistic. The Gospel According to Water feels like a purification of that approach; indeed, there may be no songwriter currently working whose lyrics work as well as standalone poetry (maybe Karen Peris of The Innocence Mission), and Gospel is the rare album that may be best experienced by reading along with the words, where you can see them arranged on the page in neat stanzas. Consider the tidy couplets in “Green of the Afternoon,” which the novelist Colum McCann rightly situates in the mystic lineage of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

I mean to sing of love that goes uncured–
You come to me and silence every word;
You come to me and silence every word…
But what goes unspoken may not go unheard

Henry understands the formal power in such tight, carefully structured writing, which might explain his ongoing allegiance to standards. At least since Scar he’s written songs that sound like tattered pages from the Great American Songbook, and The Gospel According to Water includes some of his most desolate, his most melodically robust. “Famine Walk,” the spindly album opener, sounds like a wee small hours confession from some alternate-universe Frank Sinatra, laid low by grievous loss, hollowed out by a few too many things that didn’t go his way. The sighing “Gates of Prayer Cemetery #2,” with a wistful moan from Levon, could pass as nightclub fodder from the world of Jim Jarmush’s zombie movie (“the dead from here, don’t stay dead long”). But the album’s most distinctive feat of songwriting is “Orson Welles,” a character sketch that belongs in the category with Henry’s previous songs to Richard Pryor and Charlie Parker. This form is associated with Henry in the same way that blue-collar malaise is associated with Springsteen, sexy Bible stories with Leonard Cohen, triple-decker puns with Elvis Costello; his song for Welles isn’t Wikipedia-style recitation but a tender, first-person reckoning with a man who ascended too high and too quickly, and now must make peace with inevitable decline (“if you provide the terms of my surrender, I’ll provide the war”).

There is enormous temptation to consider the album solely in light of its backstory, to hear it as a “brush with mortality” album along the lines of the latter-day Johnny Cash recordings, perhaps Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. But while the songs here are informed by recent trials, they resist any effort to hear them as songs about cancer, nor even songs about death. The larger concern is living in uncertainty, locating a personal center of gravity in a world where there’s never firm footing to be found; following the shadows as they point toward the light. “How is it we’ve held out through all of these rumbling years/ that rush like the wind from our sails in a tumble of tears?” Henry asks in “The Book of Common Prayer,” and it’s a useful framing question for the songs that surround it. For his part, the narrator in “General Tzu Names the Planets for His Children” ascribes titles to the heavenly bodies that spin ever beyond his reach, telling himself he’s imposed order on a vastness untroubled by the vanity of his decrees. In “Bloom,” the singer imagines time as a couple of freight trains, rumbling past him in either direction; he’s left standing at the station, capturing a moment’s clarity in a tumble of romantic verse.

Several songs in Henry’s Gospel employ the language of religious pilgrimage and devotion, though it’s always with a tacit rejection of anything overly dogmatic. “Not all are saved, not all of us care to be,” he admits in “Green of the Afternoon,” dismissing the idea that peace is found in the grip of assurance, asserting instead a kind of contentment found in the quest itself, a surrender to impermanence and uncertainty. Another white flag is unfurled in “Choir Boy,” the gnarled and off-kilter closing song, which includes the closest thing this album offers to prescriptive advice: “Raise your hands above your head and hold the air/ kick your keys in front of you into grass and leave them there/ surrender everything back to the ground.” Sometimes, surrender isn’t entirely optional. The man in “Famine Walk” speaks to “the heart off guard but ever opened wide,” sounding as though he’s been robbed of anything to cling to save his own trembling vulnerability. (“You’ve gotta get taken for everything to have anything to give,” an Over the Rhine song counsels.)

The true Gospel religion is ratified in “The Book of Common Prayer,” where all of us are bound together in acknowledgement of “love and the breach it repairs.” With any luck, a copy of this record will find its way into the hands of Nick Cave, who, following the tragic death of his teenage son, spoke about loss as a catalyst for radical openness, empathy, and zeal for human connection. Like Cave’s Ghosteen, Henry’s album reckons with private catastrophes but refuses isolation; its woundedness points toward the grace and understanding we owe one another, and to how we find our bearings not in relation to the shifting ground but to the neighbors reeling and scrambling alongside us. “In Time for Tomorrow,” ravishing pastoral folk, sounds like a word of resolve from two lovers whose intention is to put their season of bereavement behind, no matter what circumstance dictates. And “The Fact of Love,” so big and dramatic one’s tempted to call it a power ballad, casts its eye to an uncertain horizon before doubling down on love’s invitation here and now. “The hour now is hanging free/ and the stars are still above our heads,” sings Henry. How’s that for good news?

One Heart Goin’ Both Directions: Miranda Lambert considers contentment

.Reading time 10 minutes.

wildcard

“I’ve got a track record,” admits Miranda Lambert on her seventh solo album, as if we don’t already know it; as if we haven’t seen the supermarket tabloids, or carefully considered her unassailable catalog of songs about kerosene dreams and mama’s broken hearts; about loving and leaving, often in a shower of gunpowder and lead. Wildcard references the darkest implications of those songs occasionally, obliquely, noncommittally; in “Way Too Pretty for Prison,” Lambert won’t be bothered to dirty her hands bumping off a cheatin’ fool, though you could perhaps talk her into hiring someone to make it all look like an accident. The restlessness that runs through Lambert’s songbook is nevertheless crucial subtext here, often out of sight but seldom out of mind: This is an album that uses personal history and public mythology as context for hard-won serenity and joy. It turns admissions of personal weakness into declarations of strength; it lends wisdom to songwriting tropes that have occasionally teetered close to youthful caricature. For all the justifiable talk about how Wildcard is distinct in Lambert’s catalog— how it’s her party record, her rock and roll record, her New York record— its power is felt most fully when you know the backstory.

This fresh chapter does bring some shake-ups, notably in the producer’s chair; until now all of Lambert’s albums, including the three with Pistol Annies, have been helmed by Frank Liddell. For this one she enlisted Jay Joyce (Brothers Osborne, Ashley McBryde, Eric Church), who swaps lived-in earthiness for a glistening sheen. Wildcard revels in surface-level pleasures; “Mess with My Head,” tightly-wound pop perfection, delivers a high that’s every bit as rapturous and ephemeral as the one-night-stand that it documents. The album sounds as loose and as colorful as any Lambert has made: The guitars are gnarly and loud, the drums have plenty of snap. Lambert’s pop songs are confectionary delicacies; “Track Record” rides a featherweight New Wave synth, while “Settling Down” surrenders its anxieties to chiming guitars and swirling keyboards. Elsewhere, Joyce dresses up the rootsier material with stylized remove; “Holy Water” brings in a gospel choir and swamp-rock sleaze, and “Way Too Pretty for Prison” feels as sturdy as a classic R&B ballad, as trashy as a garage rock knockoff. In “Locomotive,” harmonica wails over an off-the-rails groove, and the singer wails even louder; it’s raucous country-blues filtered through the New York Dolls’ scruff. Lambert has always been equal-parts country traditionalist and country disruptor, and Wildcard cleverly calls back to some of the pioneers whose disruptions in the 1980s and 1990s are almost taken for granted today; you might think of the agitated rock and roll attitude of Steve Earle circa Guitar Town, but more than anything Wildcard nods to the kineticism and elasticity of King’s Record Shop, the landmark album from Rosanne Cash— a trailblazer whose influence looms large over Lambert and so many of her peers.

Lambert and Joyce keep the feel so light and breezy, you might almost overlook the high level of craft, evident even when Lambert indulges in frivolities (all of them welcome following the magnificent but demanding ballast of 2016’s The Weight of These Wings, still her deepest album). “It All Comes Out in the Wash” hawks detergent and promises, no matter what you’re going through, that this too shall pass; it’s proud down-home cornpone but savvier than it seems, and Lambert reads its hokey vernacular as holy writ, wringing countless delights from her deep Texas drawl. “Tequila Does,” Wildcard’s purest honky tonk, sounds at first like it may collapse under its heavy-handed bordertown rhymes (“with a blonde senorita/ and a tall margarita”), but it reveals itself to be a smart piece of writing with a timeless premise: Dudes generally don’t live up to their lofty promises, but booze is pretty reliable. It’s one of the happiest songs you’ll ever hear about going home from the bar all by your lonesome. And what about “White Trash,” which opens the album amid a flurry of digitally-processed banjo notes? Maybe Lambert’s thumbing her nose at the purists, or maybe she just feels like country music is meant to be a gas.

Of course there’s another big shake-up in Lambert’s life, and that’s Brendan McLoughlin, the New York City cop Lambert met and married in the year spanning Interstate Gospel and Wildcard. Perhaps newlywed bliss is one explanation for the album’s cheerful countenance, but Lambert seems to intuit something that Chance the Rapper learned the hard way: Writing persuasively about contentment is easier said than done. To that end, Wildcard isn’t as carefree as it sounds. In “How Dare You Love,” one of a couple of Ashley Monroe co-writes, Lambert describes romance as something that happened to her when she was looking the other way, its capriciousness exciting but maybe a little disconcerting. (Can anything that gives also take away?) “Settling Down” is a tug of war between her inbuilt wanderlust and her aspirations for hearth and home; she’s “one heart goin’ both directions,” with “one love and a couple of questions,” and the song abides tension rather than offering a conclusion. Wildcard wraps up with the neon squalor of “Dark Bars,” where Lambert is sober and not especially sad but still drawn to the dingy ambiance of heartache and desperation. What does it say about her that she concludes her most unsettled albums with songs of healing, and her most bucolic one with a song of unease? On Miranda Lambert albums, there are no uncomplicated emotions.

Lambert’s history makes both her frivolities and her complexities feel weightier. Indeed, the most rewarding way to experience Wildcard is to imagine that Lambert’s still playing the same restless, sometimes reckless characters she’s inhabited since her debut, deepened by wisdom and experience. She feints in that direction in “Way Too Pretty for Prison,” where Lambert and Maren Morris realize they’ve got better things to do than play Thelma and Louise, a prospect that Lambert and Carrie Underwood were all too happy to entertain just five short years ago. And of course there’s “Track Record,” which picks up a heartbreak thread running through “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (where she was vengeful and violent), “Love Letters” (where she was rueful), and “Things That Break” (where she realized just how easily she makes a mess of every good thing that comes her way). “Track Record” doesn’t erase or downplay that history, but it does view it through a lens of grace and understanding; for what may be the first time, Lambert goes easy on herself. “Can’t help it, I’m in love with love,” she admits, a hungry heart whose biggest fault is the intensity of her devotion. She makes a similar case for herself in the folksy “Bluebird,” where her loves and losses are seen in the broader context of her own flinty resilience. That’s the point of “Locomotive,” too: “I don’t run out of steam,” she boasts, and what these songs amount to is a total recontextualization of the heartache narrative she’s been writing since Kerosene, one she sees clearer than ever as a tale of hard knocks, survival, and maturation.  “I know a thing or two about broken hearts,” she sings in “Dark Bars.” Maybe that’s why she ended this album on a relative downer: For as frisky and innocent as these songs may sound, every one of them is a song of experience.