http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/music/feature/
Kelly Willis
"What I Deserve"
Rykodisc
Flesh and blood
KELLY WILLIS' NEW ALBUM, "WHAT I DESERVE," IS AN
ANTIDOTE TO THE SLICKNESS THAT'S RUINED COUNTRY
MUSIC.
BY CHARLES TAYLOR |
A few years ago, without
really intending to, I
stopped listening to most
new country music.
When the most
enthusiasm I could
muster for certain new
records was, "Well, it's
not as slick as it might
be," I realized that I had simply stopped expecting
the genre to produce anything much of interest. The
slicking up of country music was nothing new; it had
been going on at least since the countrypolitan sound
of the '60s. But in the last few years that slickness
has felt like a stake through the heart. I suppose I
could learn to tell Shania's voice from Tricia's from
Deana's from Mindy's if I put my mind to it. But
nothing I've heard has made the trouble it would
take seem worth it.
More popular than ever, country music is also -- as
a form -- more debased than ever. Turn to your
local country station or switch on TNN and what
you hear is less the country sound than
representations of that sound, voices and guitars that
twang as if they'd been programmed, everything
stripped of the dirt of experience. The truth is that
the themes country music has traditionally dealt with
-- sin, loss and its acceptance, redemption or the
refusal of it -- have no place in a genre that has been
reduced to the manufactured emotion of party
songs, empowerment songs (for the women singers),
MOR ballads. The sort of schlocky material done by
the singers that people in their 40s and late 30s grew
up seeing on talk shows -- the likes of Jerry Vale,
Sandler and Young, Vic Damone -- is now being
churned out in a country idiom. The "rock" side of
country is no less safe. For aging rock audiences, the
flashy stage shows of performers like Garth Brooks
or Shania Twain are a sort of security blanket,
allowing people who long ago stopped paying
attention to rock 'n' roll to feel as if they're still in
the fold.
The bright spots have been sparse. I continue
listening to Martina McBride because, despite all the
second-rate material and musicianship she settles
for, I still hear a real person when she sings. (And
I'm not ready to give up on anyone who delivered as
powerful a performance as "Independence Day,"
perhaps the greatest single of the decade, certainly
the most subversive.) But McBride's success is not
likely to encourage her to take on the material or
sidemen that would challenge her. And I don't know
when we're likely to hear another album from
Bobbie Cryner, whose 1995 "Girl of Your Dreams,"
the toughest set of marriage songs since Richard and
Linda Thompson's "Shoot Out the Lights," showed
how real feeling might be possible in the slick
country mainstream. Country radio has become so
rigidly formatted that a few years ago the Mavericks'
last album, "Trampoline," which you might have
expected to spawn hit after hit, was ignored as too
rock 'n' roll (and ignored as too country by rock
stations). After his last album, "Unchained," which
got no airplay, won a Grammy, Johnny Cash took
out ads in the industry trade publications in which he
expressed thanks "to the Nashville music
establishment and country radio for your support" --
alongside a 1969 picture of him giving the finger to
the camera. There's no better example of what's
wrong with country radio than the fact that you
won't hear artists like Shaver (whose "Tramp on
Your Street" may be the finest country album of the
decade) or Alison Krauss, perhaps the purest voice
in country right now. The bits of slickness that crept
into "So Long, So Wrong," the last album from
Krauss and her band, Union Station, suggested she
was in for a long, uncertain fight to continue playing
her music the way she wanted.
All this is by way of breathing a sigh of relief that
Kelly Willis' new album, "What I Deserve," a title
that seems both boastful and ironic, is a sure sign
that she has rejected the mainstreaming moves of
her last album, 1993's "Kelly Willis." Willis has
sacrificed some of the rockabilly flavor of her first
two albums, 1990's "Well Traveled Love" and
1991's "Bang Bang." "What I Deserve" is a darker
piece of work, and a more coherent one. The
emotions and playing on the album are all of a piece,
a darker piece. Which is why you're not likely to
hear anything from "What I Deserve" on any
airwaves near you. "No, you don't get off easy,"
Willis sings toward the end of the record, and the
line sticks because it comes at a time when country
music is all about getting off easy, about disposable
emotion. "What I Deserve" is about being in the grip
of emotions so big they seem not as if they started
inside the singer, but as if they were waiting around
for her to get caught in their grip. And they don't
sound as if they'll be dissipating any time soon. Not
every song here is a sad song, but Willis has made
the slow, easy roll of "I Got a Feelin' For Ya" feel of
a piece with the heartbreak of "Wrapped," made us
hear the potential for sadness lurking inside every
happiness. The entire album is shot through with the
fatalism that's particular to country. "You hold me
close in your arms/And I feel the cold," she sings in
the album's closer, "Not Long For This World," a
song that lives up to the Fassbinder title: Love Is
Colder than Death. Throughout "What I Deserve,"
Willis sings as if to ward off that chill.
"What I Deserve" was recorded in Austin, which has
emerged as the anti-Nashville. But it doesn't wallow
in the glumness that makes some alterna-country
easier to admire than love. Willis may feel the
shudder of mortality, but her delivery is palpably
flesh-and-blood. She's never so hooked on misery
that her timing and phrasing get dragged down into
the atmospherics of a song. There's an essentially
engaged quality to her singing. The title track is an
admission of defeat that climaxes with the line "Hell,
I've walked a long way just to find the end of my
rope," that's as beaten-up and as specific as the
scratches and cigarette scars on a barroom counter.
Listening to "What I Deserve" brought home, for
me, why I've never been able to join in the
accolades that are regularly laid at the feet of
Lucinda Williams. The heartache in Williams' songs
finally counts for nothing because it's so unvaried,
so wallowed in. Put it this way: Who can be
bothered to care about the trials of a singer who
sounds as if she doesn't have the energy to get
through the goddamn verse?
Willis never forgets that she has to put a song
across. There are surges and sudden husky swoops
in her normal, almost nasal, register. She's got
wonderful taste in songwriters, here covering Nick
Drake's "Time Has Told Me" and Paul Westerberg's
"They're Blind." (The truest test for any artist's
grasp of the genre they work in is what it can be
made to encompass.) There's even a nod to the
Beatles in her version of Paul Kelly's "Cradle of
Love" ("Seems like you been workin'/Eight days a
week"). The song itself is a particularly sweet
example of solace as seduction. Willis might be the
woman the singer in "A Hard Day's Night" dreams
of coming home to, knowing the things that she does
"will make him feel all right." And she's blessed
throughout with wonderful musicians. On "Not
Forgotten You," the beat slowly gathers itself behind
Willis, unobtrusively propelling the music, so that by
the time she gets to the image "Hail the Western
bound/With its black tail flying" the music has
become a song match for it.
The album seems defined by "Happy Like That,"
written by Willis and Gary Louris. All of the
discontent of the album seems to gather itself into
this number, and Willis sings it with the sound of
someone bringing bad news that we know is
undeniable before we can even question it. It's the
sound of a sort of a doomed -- but not foolish --
persistence. By the end of the final lines, Willis'
voice, soaring at their start, has been tamped down.
But the persistence of "What I Deserve" is equally
undeniable. Six years (broken only by one EP) is
three lifetimes in pop music. Willis was right to hold
out until she found a label to release the music she
wanted to make. "What I Deserve" is the album
she's been working toward since her debut.
Whatever its commercial fate, she's likely to be
around for a while. Willis has found a way to
navigate the emotional vapors while sounding too
real, too strong to make us think she's in danger of
disappearing into them.
SALON | Feb. 24, 1999
--
Tom Mohr
at the office: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
at the home: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
