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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
On "Wait Until Dark" (which Willis wrote with John Leventhal), Willis sings as one-half of a pair of illicit lovers who have to stay away from one another until the sun sets. Willis floats along on the drifting, mournful melody: "We have to waste the day/ We have to hide the way that we are." Her voice is knowing, sophisticated, vaguely regretful but aware that there are times when all of us succumb to life's complications; the song's lovers are cast as a couple of troubled, sympathetic vampires, people whose happiness comes bundled with desperation and suffering.
There are strong moral underpinnings to the country tradition: Millions of songs have been written about no-good, cheating fellers or wicked women who steal men's hearts away. (The flip side is that country music is also sympathetic to people who make mistakes, who find themselves doing things they never could have imagined themselves doing.)
Willis is a completely modern country singer in the way she deals with the genre's moralism: On Paul Kelly's "You Can't Take It With You," she reworks an old-time gospel theme, reminding us that we can't take our hard-earned riches to the grave with us. That's as upright and God-fearing a morsel of advice as ever there was -- but the twist of the song is that it also reminds us that our reputations, our ideals and even our love will be of no use to us when we're gone.
The suggestion is that we need to spend all that good stuff here, an idea that's steeped in good sense as opposed to sanctimony. And the song's banjo, acoustic guitar and mandolin, scrambling along together in a joyous chipmunk race, are almost sinfully seductive, probably because the best way to make an impression on people is, after all, to impart pleasure.
Moorer's "Miss Fortune" offers another sort of pleasure -- a darker, more brooding one, and one that doesn't always sit comfortably. "Miss Fortune" is Moorer's third album; like her previous two, "The Hardest Part" (2000) and "Alabama Song" (1998), it was executive-produced by Nashville titan Tony Brown. (Moorer is the sister of fellow country singer Shelby Lynne. The family's personal history is spliced through with tragedy: In the mid-'80s, Moorer and Lynne's father shot their mother during an argument and then turned the gun on himself.)
Moorer's record is a spectacular one; but unlike Willis' "Easy," I can't say it's one I'll reach for again and again. While I think it's crucial, in Moorer's case especially, to resist making easy pop-psychology pronouncements about artists on the basis of what we know (or think we know) about their lives, I think it's safe to say that Moorer's music is ultimately shaded by the realization that safety and comfort are always just out of her grasp. In its tone and timbre, in the way it's heavy with ghosts, in the way it leaves you feeling as if nothing will ever be quite right again, it reminds me of Mikal Gilmore's devastating and staggeringly beautiful memoir "Shot in the Heart," which deals with Mikal's complicated relationship with his older brother, executed killer Gary Gilmore, and with the specters of tragedy that trailed the family like a curse.
Moorer (who wrote or co-wrote nearly every song on the album) doesn't just give us songs about tough times and heartache as temporary states of being, as events that one can get over like a toothache; she sings about lives you just wouldn't want to lead. Some of these songs are old-time story ballads laden with tragic exaggeration. "Ruby Jewel Was Here" tells the story of a young girl, the daughter of a turn-of-the-century whore and opium addict, who shoots the brothel patron who takes her virginity.
Moorer doesn't make Ruby Jewel an easy symbol -- Ruby goes to the gallows for her "crime." Moorer sings with a snarl, making it clear that Ruby would want nothing to do with new-millennium bleeding-heart feminism; her suffering could never be recruited for anything so cheap as a mere cause. "Ruby Jewel" is just as hard a song as its name suggests, and the voice of its singer (although not her heart) is harder still: It's the diamond that hasn't forgotten it came from carbon.
"Miss Fortune" isn't technically a country album, but it's a Southern record if there ever was one, a '60s style R&B record in the vein of Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield, accented by horns that sound borrowed from Muscle Shoals. Moorer's songs get you precisely because it's hard to resist their alluring, good-timey sound. In fact, if you never bother to listen to the words, you'll be convinced "Miss Fortune" is a much happier record than it actually is.
