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You almost accept that this is just the way it is. Then you hear someone who can sing ballads that have you singing along instead of cringing as you reach for the skip button. A skilled lyricist with a voice so heavenly you start singing her praises to your friends with a missionary's zeal. Then you discover she looks good enough to satisfy the most video-obsessed, Svengali-wanna-be record label exec and once again you're shaking your head at the vagaries of the music business. Even if you aren't a music geek, I suspect you'll react to Becky Schlegel's music the same way I have. A small town South Dakota native, Schlegel has been making music most of her life. She started piano lessons in kindergarten and began playing professionally, touring VFWs and Legion Halls, as a member of her mother's country band while still in junior high. I mentioned Schlegel to Mark Wyatt of Columbus, Ohio's One Riot One Ranger and he immediately recognized her as the singer for True Blue, the bluegrass band she formed after moving to Minneapolis in the mid-90s. Selected as the 2000 Bluegrass Band of the Year by the Minnesota Music Academy, True Blue played "strictly bluegrass." With the solo release of Red Leaf Schlegel has expanded beyond bluegrass, allowing other musical influences into the mix. Listening the first time to Red Leaf you'll notice several love songs, some about the hurt of love gone bad, others about the pleasures of new love or when love is going well. After a few more spins you'll discover that in some way all the tunes are about love. Even the opening track "Alabama Sun," sung from the perspective of an Alabama farmer who is almost unknown and a bit of an outcast in the small town where he's lived his whole life, is ultimately a love song to his deceased wife. All I need is a bag of cotton to lay my head on down In 1918 a flu epidemic started in Kansas and quickly swept across much of the country, killing more than 20 million people. One of Schlegel's ancestors was a casualty and this inspired her to write "Little Janie," the story of one family touched by the disease. Dad has already died and Mom is fading fast. Soon Janie, the family's only child, will be left to survive by herself in what I imagine as a cold winter in rural South Dakota. Schlegel explains that she dashed off the lyrics, not fully comprehending everything she was writing. While reviewing the lyrics she reached a line buried in the next to last verse. "I said, she did WHAT," explains Schlegel. Was this a consequence of a mind demented by fever or was it the clearheaded act of a loving mother who felt a quick death was preferable to slowly dying from cold and starvation? Little Janie, Little Janie "My love, you are real as the morning / My love, you are warm as the sun," begins the aptly titled "My Love." Nothing especially wrong with these lyrics, maybe nothing great either. Avid readers of love poems might consider this a great use of imagery and analogy. Or maybe they'd think it was atrocious. Judged as poetry the lyrics to "My Love" and Schlegel's other straightforward love songs ("Your Everything," "Tell Me Now," and "Your Memory") would be too sappy -- at least for me. Of course a song is more than just lyrics. Accompanied only by mandolinist Peter Ostroushko, borrowed from folk powerhouse Red House Records, and her own guitar, Schlegel makes a believer out of me. Try turning the lights down low and waltzing in the living room with your favorite dance partner and you'll believe too. Love isn't always "warm as the sun" in my world, and it's not in Becky Schlegel's either. In "Don't Leave It Up to Me" she castigates her lover who obviously wants to leave, but doesn't have the courage to say so. Take a stand, tell me Most tunes leave room for alternate interpretations. "I Never Needed You" certainly sounds like a sour-grapes response to an ex-love, but Schlegel actually wrote it about a less than loyal friend. The title track draws an analogy between the seasonal change from fall to winter and a relationship that's run its course (to stay with my love song theme). Or maybe the parallel is to the cycles of life, singing about a parent or grandparent who's died. It all depends on how you fill in the gaps, which lines are taken literally, and which are interpreted symbolically. Yellow flower has turned and gone back down And I don't want to leave you there Lately I've taken to calling Schlegel "the Allison Krauss of the Twin Cities." Not because her vocals are similar (although at times that would be a valid comparison) but because, like Krauss, she's started from a foundation of bluegrass and crafted a sound that's much more. And that voice But why settle for my word. Americana singer-songwriter Rod Picott played a series of dates with Schlegel earlier this month. In an email I'd told him that he was in for a treat. After returning he responded, "Becky was indeed a treat. Beautiful voice. I felt like a '66 Dodge pickup parked next to a Rolls." *Treat yourself to a copy of Red Leaf at www.beckyschlegel.com Those in the Twin
Cities should buy the disc directly from Becky at a show. I'd
recommend her performance September 8th at the Rock Bend Folk
Festival in St. Peter, MN, my favorite Minnesota music festival.
www.rockbend.org |
Obsessive music geeks
like myself realize there are lots of extremely talented performers
who haven't yet -- maybe never will -- get their big break.
Over time you've decided that mainstream country music success
in the video age depends more on how appealing a performer is
without his shirt in the eyes of middle-aged housewives (Kenny
Chesney) or how well they fuel fantasies in the husbands of those
same housewives (Shania Twain) than musical talent. You've come
to understand that a hit country song needn't say anything new
if it can pull the heartstrings using the same ole clichés,
or has a hook that grabs you and a beat you can line dance to.
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