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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Dynamite new albums from the Dixie Chicks, Kelly Willis and Allison Moorer bridge the gap between alt-country and those cowboy-hat robots in Nashville.
Sep 14, 2002 | "We are changing the way we do business." -- Back cover of the CD booklet for the Dixie Chicks' "Home"
By now everyone who cares even casually about true country music knows the story of how Nashville was taken over by evil robots -- it happened sometime in the '60s, '70s, '80s or '90s, depending on who's telling the story -- and of how country radio subsequently went to hell in a multimillion-dollar handbasket. A subthread of the story is the gradual flowering of alt-country, a movement pretty much defined by the pages of the magazine No Depression, which sprung up in the mid-'90s to champion the spirit of rough-and-ready old-time country as it was interpreted (loosely or otherwise) by bands like Uncle Tupelo and the Old 97s.
Meanwhile, "country" has come to mean so many different things to so many people -- is it Johnny Cash's weatherbeaten crooning or Shania Twain's prancing-pony burlesque? -- that at the beginning of the 21st century, particularly with the music industry as weirdly fractured as it is, very few of us know how to define it at all. "We know it when we hear it," is the best most of us can do.
And as country fans of all stripes know, there is always a way to hear it, no matter what state country radio currently finds itself in. Even if an artist's presence on country radio represents a certain kind of success or acceptance, there's no doubt that "real" country is always happening in the margins, in clubs and coffeehouses, and on smaller labels or self-produced records.
But what if, at first in our minds and later in the actual industry, the gap between "mainstream" country and "outsider" country actually started to narrow? There's evidence this is happening right now. For one thing, there's the enormous bluegrass revival sparked by the popularity of the soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (Country radio continues to ignore that phenomenon, despite the fact that the "O Brother" soundtrack sold some 6 million copies.) Then there are the tremendous artistic strides being made by women in country.
Three fine, and very different, country records have been released by women artists within the past two months: One of them, the Dixie Chicks' "Home," debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, knocking Eminem down a notch. The other two, Kelly Willis' "Easy" and Allison Moorer's "Miss Fortune," although they were both made by artists with a small but solid following among critics and fans alike, don't stand a chance of becoming anywhere near as commercially successful. But these three records, released within weeks of one another, straddle the space between what country means today and what it can mean -- and suggest that the distance may be collapsing.
Taken together as a snapshot of the current state of country music (however we define it), these three records stand in stark opposition to the gummy plastickiness of country divas like Twain and Faith Hill. They're as different from one another as morning, afternoon and evening, yet in terms of their craftsmanship and honesty they're not so different at all.
Willis and Moorer, of course, work on a much smaller scale than the Dixie Chicks: They don't have arenas full of fans to please, and at this point the idea of country radio airplay has become such a pipe dream for most artists that it won't faze them if they don't get it. What's more, the Dixie Chicks, you could argue, have always had as carefully cultivated an image as Twain -- the difference, and it's a significant one, is that they at least made better music. Still, there always seemed to be something suspiciously prefab about them: Whether it was fair to say it or not, they just seemed to sound like the right girls at the right time.
But "Home" sounds almost shockingly fresh and unmanicured -- in other words, less tailored for country radio than you'd probably expect. That's not to say it doesn't have commercial appeal. "Home" is a mainstream record pure and simple, and doesn't pretend to be otherwise. But the Dixie Chicks sing as if they don't give a damn whether they're hot or not, and that makes all the difference. There's often something magnificently rough or off about their harmonies -- these aren't pop harmonies, with all their attendant easily grasped pleasures, but mountain harmonies, whose trickier beauty lies in the way they sometimes slide dangerously close to being "wrong."
Lead vocalist Natalie Maines (her father is Austin pedal-steel guitarist Lloyd Maines, who has played with Joe Ely, among others) goes for gutsiness over warbly vulnerability every time, even on the album's ballads; Emily Robison and Martie Maguire add richly shaded harmony vocals and weave lustrous textures out of fiddle, banjo and mandolin.
The most wholly gorgeous song on "Home" is the Chicks' version of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" -- not a cover of a pop song, but a way of revealing the truth that "Landslide" was a country song all along, a plaintive beauty directly descended from the old English and Scottish ballads from which country sprang in the first place. Other songs on "Home" push the boundaries of how much melodrama an artist can, or should, get away with, which is a fine country tradition in itself.
