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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
With Jack White's help, Loretta Lynn has released a country music album even godless rock 'n' rollers can embrace.
May 6, 2004 | There are plenty of rock, country and pop-music fans who don't believe in God, and I count myself among them. What I want to know, then, is why does the album of the year often arrive just at the time one is feeling lowest? At a time when there's plenty to be depressed about in terms of our political landscape alone, it's even more miraculous that the album of 2004, Loretta Lynn's "Van Lear Rose" is a country album: Country music supposedly promotes conservative values, socially and morally if not politically. (For every Dixie Chicks out there, we also have to reckon with a Sara Evans or a Toby Keith, artists who live by the words "our country right or wrong.")
"Van Lear Rose" doesn't have a political point of view, and, as a work of art, it is within its rights not to have one. But it is, significantly, an album very much of its time. For one thing, Lynn, like Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton before her, is reaching out to a new audience -- a rock 'n' roll one -- that's potentially more appreciative of great country music than many of the people who call themselves country fans are. Like many of her contemporaries, Lynn hasn't had great success on country radio in the past 20 years. But "Van Lear Rose," which was produced and arranged by the White Stripes' Jack White (he also sings and plays on several of the songs, and wrote the music for one of them), is Lynn's way of reaching across the boundaries that have constricted her.
"Van Lear Rose" is a country record, pure and proper, if you believe that country music is more a state of mind than a rigid genre. But even though the arrangements use all the instruments we're accustomed to hearing on a country record (fiddle, pedal steel guitar, dobro and banjo), many of them show an angular inventiveness that's downright startling. This is music that fits squarely within the tradition of country as it's been laid out here on the ground -- the difference is that it stretches up into space, where it's free to blossom into something both familiar-sounding and bracingly new.
These are songs about traditional country-music subjects: the emotional security home and hearth provide; heavy, reckless drinking; the all-knowingness of God; and, of course, cheating -- or, more specifically, being cheated on. (This is Lynn's first album made up completely of songs she wrote herself, with the exception of the brilliantly modulated guitar-and-drum backdrop White wrote for her autobiographical riff "Little Red Shoes.") Lynn's voice has both mellowed and brightened. Maybe now more than ever, its rich contrasts are laid out right up front: It's a voice that's both smooth and radiant -- not just the smoky bourbon you relish at night but the cool OJ you drink the next morning as a restorative.
That voice is showcased to perfection in songs like "Trouble on the Line," which Lynn wrote with her late husband, Oliver "Mooney" Lynn, better known as Doolittle, or "Doo." (Doolittle died in 1996; the couple had been married for 48 years -- she was 13 when they wed -- and raised six children together.) "Trouble on the Line" is the most straightforward of metaphorical country songs, using a lousy telephone connection as a symbol of miscommunication between lovers. Lynn's voice brings these types of conflicts into bold relief, evoking the way talking to someone you love very deeply can sometimes seem as futile and hollow as shouting into a Dixie-cup setup rigged up with a shaky bit of string -- the desolate echo is the same.
