08.10.06

More Mucklewain anticipation - Allison Moorer

Posted in back catalogue, mucklewain - August 10th, 2006 at 8:40 pm by Cricket

Allison Moorer’s album Alabama Song isn’t a summer fun album. It isn’t a spring flowers and sunshine right outside your window album like her new one is. It’s full of the seasonless light of two a.m. loneliness and self-realization. It’s timeless heartbreak on a backbone of good deep, soul shivering twang. For reasons I don’t understand, I think this is the least known of her albums, though perhaps only because it was her debut. I can make a good critical case for her other albums–I can recognize the greatness in them as well, but this one, Alabama Song, is the one that really speaks to me. [Hi, she's from Mobile.--Mimi]

You can’t passively listen to it–you have to take the ride the artist is offering you on this one, and the ride Allison gives is worth it.

While her music is arguably country pop, it remains truer to the traditions of country than most music associated with the mainstream country radio. I think Moorer’s voice accounts for a lot of this, and so does the orchestration with the deeper, resonating steel, as opposed to the light, brief flirt with twang that so much country pop has.

The opening song “Pardon Me” is all country in its phrasing and the sound. “You say the time has come for you to go/Why you’ve decided this, I’ll never know.” She laments her lover’s decision to go, unable to understand why he won’t just try. It’s classic in the best sense, echoing a loss that is apparent in the vocals as well as the lyrics.

“Long Black Train” and “The One That Got Away (Got Away With My Heart)” are more upbeat, despite the sense of loss in the lyrics. Moorer’s own personal tragedy is splashed through everything ever written about her–she witnessed her father taking her mother’s life. It’s no wonder that true darkness seems to pervade her music, even when she’s singing of current lovers and loss. But on both these songs, there’s more up-tempo country styling that softens the blow of her bleaker lyrics.

“Call My Name” is a song that sounds like a lament to how much she misses her mother. Even if it’s truly about something else, the personal void here is so wrenching, you can only imagine that it relates back to the worst thing that ever happened in Miss Allison’s life. You suffer along with her when she sings this, but in the best way possible, a mutual melancholy, an understanding that clinches what is most perfect about this kind of sad country song.

It’s no secret that I think “Alabama Song” is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. I’ve talked about it here before. I hear an underlying hope in this song, the love in it. It isn’t just a love song, wishing to go wherever your man is going, but a love of the place you’re from, of home. It’s abundantly clear through all the lyrics:

Are you going to Alabama
Where the folks say “how do you do”
I’d like to see those big ol’ cotton fields.

She ends stating she’ll go wherever he goes, but you can almost hear disappointment at that being any place but back home to Alabama.

[So, this song also affects me in a real way. I think this is her mirror to her sister, Shelby Lynne's, song "Where I'm From" which is one of my favorite songs ever. The expression in Allison's delivery of "Gulf of Mexico" and "Tombigee" (a river in Alabama and Mississippi) pings me right in the chest. The themes in this song--tagging along and going home--remind me a lot of "Talk to Me of Mendocino" by the McGarrigle Sisters. I think it's a sort of universal desire to want to be wanted combined with an inchoate longing for "home" that really has no actual meaning. If I still lived away, I think "Alabama Song" would have me on the first flight home to eat oysters and go to the beach.--Mimi]

The deep-rooted traditional country sound surfaces again on “Easier to Forget” and “I Found a Letter.” Each continues the theme of love lost, perhaps unexpectedly. There’s a sort of retro feel to these, not so much in the sound, but the idea of woman pining over a lover who left. The lack of “Fine, I didn’t want you anyway” means these songs are filled with the sort of self-pitying emotion I find I could never share with my friends, but still feel after a break up when listening to Patsy Cline at 3 a.m. and crying into my pillow over someone I know wasn’t good for me to begin with. Then “Set You Free” goes 180 degrees the other way, kicking the guy to the curb, even as he thinks he’ll leave. The song itself is decidedly more modern pop country than most of the album, reflecting the attitude of the lyrics.

“A Soft Place to Fall” doesn’t really grab me until the end of the song. Over all, I feel like it hints at regret and guilt, going back for one night with someone you’ve already left. You know you shouldn’t but sometimes the need for comfort wins. When she pulls it together at the end…

Baby, when you wake up, I’ll be gone
You’re the one who taught me after all
How to find a soft place to fall

…it somehow loses the remorsefulness I found earlier, as if he somehow got what was coming to him. Yeah, I dig that.

We close with “Is Heaven Enough for You” a song as strong as the title track is. I want to dance to this song with a rodeo cowboy whose name I don’t even know, as the bar closes and everyone else has left. [And we have achieved the invocation of rodeo cowboy, folks, keep your fingers and toes inside the car at all times.--Mimi] I want to listen to it laying under cool winter skies and wondering if spring will ever appear. Again, the loss here is acute and she shares it so beautifully, so willingly that I just want to wallow in it.

If you’re going start with Allison, start here–at the beginning. If my words aren’t enough, come see her at Mucklewain, where hopefully she’ll be playing these sad old songs, along with her newer, happier ones. I’ve seen her live, just her and her guitar, and she spins a good yarn, sings a beautiful song. I think the ticket price is worth it for her alone. [Her and Steve Earle, philistine!--Mimi] [Steve goes without saying. It's like when they have to take Harry Potter off the bestseller list to make room for other books. Steve surpasses all.--Cricket]

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