Americana Music Reviews

 

Kelly Willis
Easy
Rykodisc
by Al Kunz

In the interest of full disclosure, I think Bruce Robison is the luckiest man in the world. A smidgen of common sense and an 1,169 mile drive down I-35 in one of those big yellow Penske trucks are all that stand between my current life and becoming an obsessive stalker-fan in Austin. If you insist on an objective review, you'd do best to go elsewhere.

Kelly Willis left MCA records in the mid-90s after her third release (Kelly Willis in 1993). It's been widely reported that this split was largely over her discomfort with how she was being promoted (as a sex symbol, the promotion machine working well enough to get her listed on People magazine's 50 sexiest people one year) as well as disagreement over musical direction. This was the same period when Garth Brooks was changing the face of mainstream country music. Shania Twain would be coming along soon. It isn't a big jump to guess what the label thought they wanted.

Over the next six years Willis released the hard-to-find Fading Fast, a four-song EP, and cuts on a few compilation albums. Fans outside Texas (where she continued to perform regularly) were left waiting and wondering what would come next. Willis was wondering too, finally recording a disc without a label contract, then shopping it to labels with a "take it as it is or don't take it at all" attitude. Eventually indie label Rykodisc accepted her conditions and released What I Deserve, the first full helping from the new, more independent Kelly Willis in 1999. Although she was involved in writing almost half the songs on What I Deserve, Willis enlisted co-writers on all but one. Its radio-friendly songs didn't find a slot on the narrow play lists of most mainstream country stations, but still found an audience among both Americana fans and those with more mainstream tastes who weren't content with the bland diet of country radio. Easy is the next logical step in Willis' musical evolution.

Willis augments members of her road band with guitarists Chuck Prophet and Mark Spencer (Blood Oranges) along with former Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan. Several high-profile musicians also make guest appearances. Allison Kraus sings backup on "Not What I Had in Mind," but the most notable of these guest appearances is the star-filled cover of Australian Paul Kelly's "You Can't Take it with You," where Vince Gill, Dan Tyminski of Oh Brother fame, and Nickel Creek's Chris Thile contribute. Initially the lyrics, built around the biblical passage equating a rich man's chance of getting to heaven being as likely as a camel passing through the eye of a needle, struck me as clichéd. But, for me, Willis's vocals can redeem almost any song. With Gill and Tyminski harmonizing in the background to a bluegrass-like accompaniment driven by Thile's mandolin and Rolf Sieker on banjo, I found this track compelling in spite of first impressions. Then it hit me -- some of the things you can't take with you aren't quite what the bible was referring to. ("You might have a great reputation so carefully made/and a set of high ideals, polished up and so well displayed").

Marica Ball's "Find Another Fool" and "What Did You Think" from Bruce Robison's Long Way Home From Anywhere (with one of my favorite lines: "Long enough of throwin' good love after bad") both receive excellent treatments from Willis. But the cream of the covers has to be "Don't Come the Cowboy with Me Sonny Jim!" Written and originally recorded by the late Kristy MacColl, "Sonny Jim" is sung from the viewpoint of a party girl and, for many, a woman of convenience. She believes Sonny Jim is a better person than the men she normally encounters, so when his behavior starts sinking to the level of the others, she calls him on it, insisting that he's better than that.

Over-confidence has never been a fault that applies to Willis. Under-confidence is another story. Stories of stage fright (which manifests itself as an endearing, shy vulnerability while performing) and of co-writers (recruited for help finishing songs they felt were already complete) have been a part of most press coverage of Willis the last several years. Suddenly with the release of Easy, the coverage has changed. Several theories have been floated (the relative success of What I Deserve, becoming a mother for the first time, husband Bruce Robison's recent songwriting success, and so on), but regardless of why, everyone agrees that Willis is showing new-found confidence. I believe recording "Sonny Jim" was more an issue of confidence than vocal maturity, no matter what Willis tells interviewers. But what led me to the same conclusion as everyone else were the songs Willis wrote herself. While she had a hand in writing six songs each on Easy and What I Deserve, all but one on the latter were co-writes. On Easy she resisted drafting another writer to polish songs that didn't need polishing, only using collaborators for two of them ("Getting to Me" with Gary Louris of the Jayhawks and "Wait Until Dark" with John Leventhal). In both cases, she used partners with whom she has long-standing songwriting relationships and past successes.

One of the songs written solo, "If I Left You," opens the disc and is apparently the first "single" (if that term still applies these days). I'm still waiting for it to be played on the radio here in the frozen north, but the video is getting decent rotation on the country video channels. As videos go, it's pretty boring, although it is succeeding by getting the song in front of a broader audience. It also illustrates one of Willis' most appealing qualities. Watching the video without sound gives the impression that it might be a party or a group of friends having a sing-along in the living room. But a few times the focus cuts away to scenes that don't fit, culminating with a man coming through the front door with a sheepish, almost nervous look. These scenes contradict the appearance of an upbeat, happy story. It could easily go either way, leaving it up to the viewers to decide. The lyrics, especially the chorus ("But you left me/alone here in my misery/that's not something I would do/if I left you") seem like another tearjerker ballad. Nothing in the music or pace of the song rules that out either. But the addition of Willis' vocals puts you back on the fence. My preference is an upbeat song, and in Willis' vocals I hear strength in the face of adversity. I end up feeling positive, even when the lyrics are everything but. Others rave about Willis' ability to jerk the tears. Both groups are right, and both get what they want.

If what you look for is pure emotion, the disc closer, "Reason to Believe," should do the trick. Willis recently explained on Nashville Public Radio's The Songwriter Sessions that while written about her twenty-month old son, she hoped "it would come across as about love, anywhere you find it, [because] it's so powerful." But she's also thinking ahead to the teenage years, explaining, "If he ever knocks on my door in the middle of the night and tells me I suck, I'll just crank this up really loud and try to fill him with guilt. It's my job as a mother."

Now my dreams can all come true
Now my life can follow through
Suddenly it's all so clear
There's not a thing that I should fear

Who'd have thought that it would start
With the beating of your heart
That the world would stop for me
And show me love like it should be

And there you have it, my less than objective review. Of course a truly objective music review, assuming such a thing is even obtainable, would be worthless. The one thing that really matters, does the music move you, is nothing but subjective. If we could judge by objective standards then we'd all be in agreement that Kenny Chesney is just a weasel-faced pop-singer-wannabe in a cowboy hat, and I wouldn't have to change the radio station so often.

*Visit www.kellywillis.com or www.rykodisc.com for more.



Contact Al Kunz at kunz-at-rockzilla.net

 
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