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Allison Moorer: Mockingbird
AMG Review:
There is something oddly "coincidental" about Allison Moorer's Mockingbird album being released just a couple of weeks after her sister Shelby Lynne's Just a Little Lovin'. Both albums are covers sets with one original apiece. That said, they are wildly different albums. While Lynne's record is a stripped down collection of tunes associated with the late British vocalist Dusty Springfield, Moorer's is a natural sounding set of tunes that run the gamut from rock & roll to the early barrelhouse and modern jazz-blues to country and folk and indie — and there is one song on it by Lynne. The album was produced by Buddy Miller and includes a stellar cast of players that includes everyone from Richard Bennett and Moorer's husband Steve Earle to Miller and his wife Julie, Darrell Scott, Tammy Rogers, Tim O'Brien, Phil Madeira, and many others. It's a lush record, but it's an organic one. All the sounds here are rooted in the earth, and everything put in play in these arrangements serves the songs whether they are by June Carter, Patti Smith, or Chan Marshall.
The set opens with Moorer's self-written title track, an open acoustic folksy ballad with warmly toned layers of acoustic guitars, a brushed snare and hi hat, a B-3, and the Nashville String Machine (no, this is not the countrypolitan string sound of old, but something very warm, open, and woody sounding). The tune begins as a folksy ballad but opens up to become a stellar and graceful pop tune with R&B touches courtesy of Jim Hoke's tough tenor saxophone solo. The big crescendo comes when the strings pile up on top of everything but the drums create a big wave for Moorer's contralto to glide over. She's expressive, deep, and heart achingly engaged and goes right down into the middle of them. The version of "Ring of Fire" here will delight fans of Daniel Lanois, though Miller does it way better, without the cavernous reverb that makes cough syrup out of the mix. It's a very slow 4/4 with violin, viola, and B-3 walking alongside the singer as she lets her voice ring over the top. The insistent yet nearly quiet chant of military marching drums is a nice touch. The version of Patti Smith's "Dancin' Barefoot" here simply has to be heard to be believed. It's amazing, and for those who still like rock music, it's a contender for the best track on the set, despite its reverential reading. Moorer's voice is well trained, her enunciation captures what is at the heart of Smith's song as it expresses the kind of desire that no longer panics at the surprising power of its depth — as revealed on the previous track — but surrenders totally to its raw need. The lyrics walk along the knife's edge between third and first person, with the effect of the singer observing herself going through the motions, awash in that violent yet utterly addictive emotion that feels like nothing else. The layers of electric guitars, tambourines, cymbals, and popping drums with the B-3 just washing through it all is monstrous, and obsessive, yet comes right from the same terrain the lyrics and melody do.
Nina Simone's "Sugar in My Bowl" offers a rootsier reading of the great singer and pianist's tune. Moorer can sing anything, and her manner of working with the acoustic guitars, bluesing out around the keyboards and brushed drums as she sways and swings and swoops, letting her voice walk right to the edge before reigning it in. The version of Gillian Welch's and David Rawlings' "The Revelator" is a great improvement on the original: it's more fleshed out musically, just as it needed to be. Simply put, Moorer is a better singer; she doesn't whine or affect with her voice; she's unafraid to let the real darkness in the lyric come to the fore, she doesn't hide it under a false vein of innocence or victimization, or a feigned backwoods sheen. It's wonderful to hear Kate McGarrigle's "Go Leave" again, especially given this spare treatment. It will hopefully create in those hearing it the desire to investigate the McGarrigles own records. Moorer's voice simply allows the song to have its way, while she follows it with rapt attention. It's easy to understand Moorer's attraction to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," though we didn't need another version. Period. We do, however, need more revealing versions of songs like Ma Rainey's "Daddy Goodbye Blues" with Steve Earle's nasty distorted electric guitar underscored by a big old New Orleans style bass drum, a mandolin, and Moorer singing through some old microphone. In fact, other than the electric guitar amp — which sounds like it's there but recorded without being plugged into the board — all the instruments sound as if they are recorded from the floor with the vocal. Killer.
The remaining tracks are all fine as well. But here, Julie Miller's "Orphan Train," as sung by one — Moorer's mother was killed by her father in front of her and Lynne — is far too powerful to describe here, as is Lynne's "She Knows Where She Goes," which is its prelude. Suffice to say that these are both songs that come from the American country and folk traditions that Nashville is just plain afraid of because their truth hasn't been included in its version of the nation since Gretchen Peters' classic song "Independence Day" was sung by Martina McBride at the dawn of the contemporary country era. Miller is one of those songwriters who isn't out there enough, and maybe that's what she wants, but it would sure be good to hear more from her. The album nears its end with Marshall's tender, simple, and deeply moving "Where Is My Love," which is a wonderful follow-up to the aforementioned cuts. It sounds as if it's sung by the survivor, the hero, the empty-handed and full-hearted who has paid the cost and has little to show for it except the ache of loneliness. When Moorer, Miller and company bring it all to a close with Jessi Colter's "I'm Looking for Blue Eyes," it's as if that circle that began with "Mockingbird" has come fully around; it travels from leaving something behind, to becoming being immersed in — indeed overwhelmed by — the power of desire, lust, and the newness and danger of love, to loss, reflection, survival, and the cleansing loneliness that is at the heart of beginning again. Moorer, a songwriter and singer who has followed a restless and treacherous path through the wiles of Nashville's machine-like music business and lived to tell about it, ups her own ante here both creatively and emotionally. It is her warmest, most ambitious, searing, and gutsy record yet.
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