Kelly Willis all grown up; A new album. Her own songs.
john t. davis
* 02/18/99
Austin American-Statesman
(Copyright 1999)
`My Gawd," said Kelly Willis' luncheon companion. "The last thing
I'd think you wanted to look at is another plate of barbecue."
It was a reasonable enough assumption. Shortly after Willis blew
into town in 1987, her band, Kelly and the Fireballs, landed a
regular gig on the outdoor stage at Green Mesquite BBQ, on the corner
of Barton Springs and Lamar.
Willis herself, then on the shy side of 20, virtually personified
the phrase "a mere slip of a girl," but she was the possessor of a
Kelly-and-a-half voice that yanked enough heads sideways to make a
chiropractor about two-thirds rich. (That voice was -- and remains --
a wondrous instrument, warmly flavored with a Southern purr, and as
richly burled as walnut paneling. When Willis sings, it is the
aural equivalent of a cat curling up in your lap.)
All the same, there are only so many nights a girl wants to come
home after midnight smelling like an ambulatory brisket . . . One
couldn't blame Willis if she regarded what Little Richard used to
call "bobby-cue" with ambivalence.
"Naw," she said on this February day, as she tucked into a bowl of
jambalaya crowned with a glistening hunk of Elgin smoked sausage.
"God, you can't live in Texas and not like barbecue."
Speaking of the Green Mesquite days, she sounded as though she
were analyzing another girl's performance: "I was so self-conscious
and scared that I don't even remember what happened . Other people
go, `Oh, remember when this happened?' And I go, `Oh yeah. . .'
But I would never have remembered it on my own because all my
memories are about just being terrified."
A decade-and-change later, at the ripe old age of thirty-and-a-
half, Willis remains as burdened by fears, doubts, second guesses
and insecurities as anyone in her audience. But she has uncovered a
liberating secret. Well, it's not a secret, exactly -- it's just
something everyone has to discover for themselves. Namely, that
freedom only comes from taking chances, not from avoiding them.
Onstage, she said, "I used to joke that I wanted to tell everyone
to stop looking at me, `I know I'm in the middle of the stage here,
but I don't want you to look at me!' "
But, she continued, "The more you perform and the more you
actually are bad or mess up, you come to realize it's not the end of
the world. You get more confident. You get better. You get used to
whatever it was you were afraid of."
A similar revelatory process informed the making of her fifth
(including the limited-edition 1996 EP, "Fading Fast") and long-
deferred album, "What I Deserve." Not only is it her debut effort
for a new label, Rykodisc, "What I Deserve" also features six songs
written or co-written by Willis. She has never been as well-
represented as a writer on an album.
The remainder of the disc is fleshed out by songs from the late
English songwriter Nick Drake, Austin's Damon Bramblett, Paul
Westerberg (formely of the Replacements), Gary Louris of the
Jayhawks, veteran R&B master Dan Penn and a pair of tunes from her
spouse, Bruce Robison.
Measuring the artistic distance between "What I Deserve" and her
last full album, 1993's "Kelly Willis," she said, "I think it's just
the natural growth that anyone would have over five years, especially
coming out of your mid-20s, when you're just figuring out who you
are. Mostly, I think it's just that I got more confident. There's a
point of view and a focus to this album that's a lot different for
me. I take a long time to write a song, and that's usually because
it's about something real, and I want it to end up sounding real."
"Sounding real" is especially important to Willis, whose career
has sometimes resembled a series of Procrustean beds. Guided for
years, for better or worse, by other musicians, managers and
producers (most notably country hitmaker and MCA Nashville
president Tony Brown), Willis often found herself being twisted and
stretched like a piece of State Fair taffy. If it serves no other
purpose, "What I Deserve" will stand as her declaration of
independence.
From Willis' point of view, the title track and "Talk Like That"
(her first solo writing credit on record) are the most important .
The songs could not be more different.
"Talk Like That" is a reminiscence, inspired by a show she played
* with bluegrass virtuoso Ricky Skaggs, that illuminates the power that
voices have to conjure up a sense of place. "I can hear my
father/And his Oklahoma drawl," she sings, "I can hear my
grandmother/Oh, I can hear them all." The melody is that of a rusty
country two-step, evoking nostalgic memories and rural roots. Coming
from Willis, who was born in Oklahoma and grew up in northern
Virginia, it has the feel of a memoir.
"What I Deserve," on the other hand, evokes no specific era, and
in fact it seems out of time entirely. A gorgeous pop performance
with its ghostly, Roy Orbison-esque "Na-na-nana" chorus, it
nevertheless conjures up a sense of dread, finding the singer
paralyzed by a fear she cannot even articulate.
"Hell, I've walked a long way just to find the end of my rope,"
she sings, and at the end of the journey, she manages only to stammer
over and over, "What I deserve. . ." as though afraid to complete
the thought or contemplate the consequences. With its beautiful
descending guitar line, "What I Deserve" might be the loveliest song
Willis has ever put on record, but it's a chilling portrait,
nonetheless. "What I deserve," she sings, "is comfort for my shaken
soul," but that solace sounds a long way off, and getting further by
the minute.
"I guess I feel like I'm taking a bigger risk with this record,"
said Willis. "And it doesn't matter as much. Back then (on her
previous albums), I was taking a smaller risk and it really mattered.
Now the risks I'm taking seem bigger -- like, some people might not
like the songs I've written. They might seem weird to them. To me,
that's a risk. But ultimately I don't really care, because that's
the only way I'm going to be happy in my professional life or my
personal life, and that's what needs to be done."
Such decisiveness, expressed so crisply, is a fresh aspect of
Willis' persona, one that seems to have emerged via age and
experience. She has been married for the past year and a half to
singer/songwriter Bruce Robison. In the same period, she performed
on last summer's hot-as-a-pistol Lilith Fair tour and took command
of her recording career, raising the money for the independent
project, moving from one label to another and switching producers en
route. There were lots of hard calls along the way.
Decision, in Willis' case, seems to have influenced demeanor. Her
gaze, when she speaks, is calm and direct . All in all, she seems
fa
removed from the willowy girl who used to hide behind her big
acoustic guitar, (Well, maybe not so far. . . "I hate it whenever I
don't play on a song! I feel like, oh God, I can't wait till it's
over. So perhaps due to that, I've learned to play guitar better,"
she says with a laugh).
"Dealing with getting older . . . it feels like it gets better.
You get smarter and wiser," she said meditatively. "I think for a
woman it's a little bit harder because you know that the way you look
has a really big impact on the way people think about you." (As she
speaks, she is illuminated by daylight pouring through the big plate
glass window of the restaurant. It is the cruelest light, as far as
a woman's complexion is concerned. But Willis, whose
strawberry-blonde good looks led to an appearance in "People"
magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People issue a few years back, displays
only a few faint lines around her eyes as evidence of the march of
time.)
"In my career, the big thing that was always talked about was how
young I was," she continued. "It was a BIG part of my appeal it
seems like. So as I was getting into my late 20s, I used to start
going, `Oh God, what are they going to talk about now? There's
nothing there!' I guess I'm sort of figuring out how to make
something be there."
Making something be there is every artist's challenge. The extent
to which Willis rises to meet that challenge is the measure by which
she will be judged at the end of the day. As if contemplating the
task ahead -- as if energized by it -- Willis puts down her fork and
gets up from the table.
There's work to do.
