The new albums by Shelby Lynne and Natalie Merchant arrive at an interesting
time. Any artists successful enough to draw the mainstream's attention are
likely to find their latest efforts evaluated more seriously, if there's any
meat to the rhetoric that the arts -- especially popular arts like music,
television, and film -- should be held to new standards following the September
11 terrorist attacks.
It's been ironic to observe TV commentators, major-label and film-studio heads,
and publications like Entertainment Weekly preach about a need for depth
in the pop world, given the river of shit they've been channeling into our
culture since the end of the alternative-rock era. Such pleas are more
convincing coming from the likes of songwriter Paul Simon, who wrote eloquently
on the subject in the September 16 New York Times. For major labels,
these concerns may simply be part of an effort to save their own assets. Sales
of new albums, the pulse of the record industry's health, are down six percent
from last year. Arista Records boss L.A. Reid was recently quoted in Rolling
Stone as saying, "We need some more talent to take us into the next decade.
We need acts like U2, acts that are still vital as they were 20 years ago."
What Reid didn't mention is that in the mid '90s Arista and the other majors
abandoned the artist-development system that built the careers of U2 and
R.E.M., and before them Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and other enduring
performers who needed to work in the spotlight to reach their ultimate
audience. Instead, these labels focused on signing one-hit wonders and easily
marketable pop-lite, aiming for maximum profit and minimum front-end
investment. So when sophomore albums by an array of immature artists from Nerf
Herder to, at the high end of the low end, Macy Gray stiffed, that was business
as usual.
Shelby Lynne was an anomaly in that environment. Although she won the Best New
Artist Grammy for her 2000 disc I Am Shelby Lynne (Mercury), she was
fortunate enough to have enjoyed -- or perhaps endured -- her own
artist-development regimen. Beginning with her 1989 debut, Sunrise, she
ricocheted from Epic's country division to Magnatone to Morgan Creek and
finally to Mercury Records (which has mergered into Island), spending years
unrecorded along the way. The longest stretch was from 1995 to the release of
I Am Shelby Lynne, a period that gave her a chance to get her
tempestuous personal life and a Grammy-winning batch of songs in order.
It's a tribute to Lynne's talent and drive that she recorded for so many
labels. In the early '90s, being dropped from majors killed careers, especially
in the small, fickle world of country music. Yet Lynne's growth and
determination to find her own true north are obvious in the five discs she made
before her breakthrough. They trace her path through traditional country,
balladeering, jazz, and swing to her emergence as the most heralded
singer/songwriter of the new millennium's debut year.
But the praises for I Am Shelby Lynne were oversung. The album, though
good, did not mark the emergence of a full-blown major talent. Lynne benefitted
from record-company publicity and timing. Her late-year release came at a point
when the personality-driven media's well was dry of fresh faces, amid an
overdose of boy-band mania and Christina-versus-Britney. Of course her
grown-up, heartbreak-inspired lyrics and her fusion of '50s girl-group rock and
American roots music and R&B seemed smart and refreshing. They were, though
they were only part of the album's make-up. And they served Lynne's husky
dust-and-honey voice, which is shaded with a sensuous Southern twang,
beautifully on adult pop like "Leavin' " and "Your Lies." What's more,
"Life Is Bad" and "Gotta Get Back" were deliciously quirky. Wobbly slide
guitars, unpredictable vocal overdubs, and a rubber-legged rhythm made the
first sound fresh; the second's references to the Devil, its New Orleans horns,
and its downcast vocal were unlike anything else aiming for the big time.
Somehow Lynne's lapses of imagination were glossed over. There are dull, lazy
passages, like the generic R&B backbone of "Thought It Would Be Easier" and
the muzak arrangement of "Dreamsome." "Gotta Get Back" suffered from a
terrible, shrill-toned harmonica melody that made its over-familiar sound
intolerable. Glitches like these marked I Am Shelby Lynne as another
stop along her way, not her destination.
There's also the matter of her image. As a writer Lynne sought to claim gritty
emotional honesty, dwelling on love's losses and other hard lessons. Yet the
lined face of the 32-year-old -- visible at the Grammys -- was airbrushed to
model-like perfection on I Am Shelby Lynne, and she played the sex-sells
game hard, wearing a fur coat with nothing underneath on the cover. It seemed
too common a ploy for a serious artist, but who could blame her? Lynne has
worked long and hard for her not-yet-certain success. Yet such pandering raised
the question how much might she change about herself -- and perhaps her art --
to sell CDs? Would she be willing to relinquish her incomplete grasp on the
artistic vision she came close to realizing with I Am Shelby Lynne?
Sadly, the answer seems to be yes. On her new Love, Shelby, the ratio of
wins to sins is reversed. Only three songs display the imagination of I Am
Shelby Lynne's highs. "Jesus on a Greyhound" is a soulful blast of country
rock, though Joan Osborne beat her to the concept with her hit "One of Us."
Still, Lynne brings the song to a more spiritual climax. "I Can't Wait" melds
the big production of Glen Ballard with Lynne's more lyric-complementing
signatures of acoustic and slide guitar, and near-a cappella passages
allow her voice to reach its full sensitivity. There's also "Tarpoleon
Napoleon," where her Southern purr rises to the fore over a bed of floating
guitars and strings. It's the album's most poetic turn, a portrait of a lover
who's a little out of synch with the world, painted in the slow, loving,
jazz-like strokes of Lynne's voice. At times the guitars conjure Jimmy Page at
his sweetest and most relaxed while the arrangement updates classic Ray
Charles.
That's all beautiful stuff, and Lynne's voice remains a delightful instrument.
Which is good, because without it we wouldn't know this is her disc. Too many
of these songs are driven by generic arrangements, from opener "Trust Me" to
the faux soul "Bend" to a final trouncing of John Lennon's touching
"Mother," which gets steamrolled by a hip-hop beat and bright, generic rock
guitars. For Lynne this song is especially poignant, since her mother was
killed by her father, who then turned the gun upon himself. But it comes across
drained and soul-less save for a few moments when the vocals and strings drift
into space -- or toward Heaven. Likewise, "Killin' Kind" would be a lovely
apology if not for an absolutely generic arrangement and a wash of
multi-tracked vocals that transforms it into the kind of power balladry in
which modern Nashville has buried its best new female voices. And when Lynne's
not copping Trisha Yearwood or sounding like mid-career Madonna or, worse,
Pink, there's the Bonnie Raitt cop "Ain't It the Truth."
Sure, Love, Shelby is entirely listenable, but if we're looking for
depth, it's absent along with the qualities that made I Am Shelby Lynne
very much her own work. It's easy to blame producer Glen Ballard, who's worked
with Barbara Streisand and Paula Abdul as well as Alanis Morissette and Dave
Matthews. Yet it's more likely that Lynne surrendered her character to her Top
40 ambitions -- an impression reinforced by the trailer-trash bedroom scene on
the new album's front cover, with Lynne in unbuttoned cut-off shorts and a
tanktop. On the back she's wearing an open jacket, again revealing that she's
shirtless.
Pardon this digression: as a heterosexual male, I do find the curve of a
partially exposed breast appealing on a primal level. But why does almost every
female singer in mainstream pop have a cover like this? Dammit, at this point
we even flash tit to sell chewing gum. It's an idiot's marketing ploy, not an
artist's. Where's the imagination? At this point the pop-music industry's
reflexive sex-sells strategy insults the intelligence of everyone who has
any.
Natalie Merchant
 |
Okay, okay. I'm over it. But that's just an easy example of why a cry for depth
has arisen.
Maybe one reason Natalie Merchant's new Motherland (Elektra) is so
appealing is that she's wearing a sweater and knit blouse on the cover. She
looks womanly and normal, sitting under a fruit tree, as if she weren't trying
to be anyone or anything but herself. So it's been with Merchant since the
beginning of 10,000 Maniacs. Granted her singing has been labile and amelodic
far too often since the days her former band stopped playing clubs. But an
artist is defined by the ability to make something concrete from a combination
of imagination, craftsmanship, and personal vision. And Merchant has never
relinquished her grasp on any of those.
On Motherland, she transcends love songs to write about freedom ("The
Worst Thing"), self-delusion ("Tell Yourself"), and strength ("I'm Not Gonna
Beg"). She slips into a few lines of Spanish poetry, opens with a bizarre song
of warning propelled by a Middle Eastern melody ("This House Is on Fire"), and
sings a number that equates the Old South's policy of Jim Crow and its legacy
of slavery with Judas Iscariot for their betrayal of what's good in man. When
Merchant does write about love, in "Build a Levee," she advises, "You gotta
build yourself a levee deep inside" to protect the heart. Certainly a more
interesting choice of metaphor than "wall."
Produced by Merchant and T-Bone Burnett, Motherland is her distinctive
work, in both its lyrics and its sonics. The nursery rhyme "Henry Darger"
employs an orchestra. Electric guitars, strings, organ, oud, and flute cavort
in the strident "The House Is on Fire." Elsewhere saxes, chamberlain, and pump
organ take bows. Although the disc would be enlivened by more uptempo material
and a few caffeinated vocal takes, there's plenty to enjoy and assess. It's
easy to be carried by the percolating drums that propel the verses of "Just
Can't Last," or drift through the dark netherworld of classical guitar and
timpani in "The Worst Thing." Or be drawn in by her language. Merchant has
learned to write in short phrases that allow her to make the most of her
limited melodic singing abilities. And she can surprise quickly, turning
"Golden Boy," a song that seems to contemplate fame and ambition, into a
portrait of a mass murderer in a flash of five words.
Neither Love, Shelby nor Motherland is a great album, but it's
always clear that Merchant's disc is art, not artifice. Only Lynne can tell us
where she drew the line between working from her heart and aiming for the
charts.
Issue Date: December 7 - 13, 2001
