>From today's New York Times:
Kelly Willis: Refugee From the Nashville
Factory Finds Her Own Audience
By BEN RATLIFF
Country music often prides itself on how much it can say and still be
taken at face value, but there was a lot of subtext coursing through
Kelly Willis's show on Friday night at the Mercury Lounge. She delivered
a pointed introduction for each song -- from the fact that her current and
former husbands were co-writers of one of them ("that qualifies me to be
a country singer," she joked) to the pride she took in set-list
juxtapositions (placing a morose, oblique song by the English cult
songwriter Nick Drake before "Heaven's Just a Sin Away," the cheery
70's honky-tonk hit by the Kendalls.)
But the biggest subtext had to do with the current direction of her career:
like Steve Earle before her, she is a refugee from the Nashville factory,
giving voice to her own style by going the independent-label,
alternative-country route, and feeling better for it. Three weeks ago she
appeared on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry for the first time,
something she was never able to do while she was making records for
Nashville producers.
"What I Deserve" (Rykodisc), Ms. Willis's newest CD, is her fourth
full-length album in 10 years and her first since leaving MCA, where she
was remade from a teen-age rockabilly singer into a full-fledged but
failed country diva. (There was also a hard-to-find EP released by A&M
in 1996 that began her crossover.) If the title sounds petulant, perhaps it
means to be: it can be read as a message from Ms. Willis to the world of
mainstream country that she has finally found her own audience without
their help.
On the title track's chorus, she sings: "Well, I have done/the best I
can/oh, but what I've done/it's not who I am."
Her performance at the Mercury could have been read that way too,
backed by a standard hard-country quartet of fiddle, bass, lead guitar
and drums, Ms. Willis sang with a thin, exact voice, as jolting as ice
water. It doesn't have a lot of weight to it, but it cut through the band
like
a laser, with ends of words curling upward and a taut, subtle vibrato
throughout. She's a good songwriter, too, as is her husband Bruce
Robison; together they wrote the bulk of the new record's songs, which
are several degrees darker, more honest and more searching about love
and self-fulfillment than the average commercial country record.
And yet it's still a modest record, not a knockout blow. The strength of
the long set was its overwhelming confidence; though she doesn't stretch
out and deviate from the arrangements and tempos of her recordings,
Ms. Willis does seem centered and on track.
