Crys Matthews - Reclamation

Charles on a great new album from an essential contemporary voice

Crys Matthews sings and writes freedom songs. Drawing from overlapping traditions informed by influences from Woody Guthrie to Holly Near to Sweet Honey In The Rock, Matthews – one of the most exciting and acclaimed voices in contemporary folk music – centers a vision of social justice that extends from the epic to the intimate, from societal transformation to personal refuge. She seeks “to amplify the voices of the unheard, to shed light on the unseen, and to be a steadfast reminder that hope and love are the truest pathways to equity and justice.” Her new album, Reclamation, extends and deepens this mission. Matthews presents a rich set of contemporary freedom songs that she and her collaborators weave from a rich tapestry of folk, country, pop, rock, R&B and the genre-less hybrids that have long characterized the work of innovative southern Black women like Matthews. The album greets our moment with the fire, heart, and insistence that it requires.

Matthews recorded Reclamation in Nashville, accompanied by a talented group including fellow travelers Kyshona, Chris Housman, Ellen Angelico, and Heather Mae. While it only sometimes centers country music in its expansive sonics, Reclamation finds its footing in the music and culture of Matthews’ adopted home, which Matthews loves and from which she demands better. The album’s fiery opener, “The Difference Between,” lays a statement of purpose atop a funky, Little Feat-inspired rhythm. “The difference between you and me,” Matthews asserts, is that “we’re as country as we wanna be without all the hate and the bigotry.” She continues, condemning both the hypocrisy of “small-town” iconography in country and the weaponization of country and southern identity to exclude and demonize. Crys Matthews’ country – both music and nation – is as big as the fiery electric-guitar solo that highlights the song’s instrumental break, and as inclusive as the many sounds that create her unique and powerful sound.

The album’s politics are sharp and incisive. On the mandolin-flecked “Like Jesus Would,” she recounts the sanctuary of finding a church that supports and respects all people and uses it to excoriate the hypocrisy Christians whose Word doesn’t match their actions. (“I Got Shoes” is there in the mix, as is “No Earthly Good.”) “Sister’s Keeper” turns a call for protection into a demand for autonomy, from bodily choice to fair wages. Over the album’s busiest and most polyrhythmic arrangement, Matthews reminds that “they don’t see us, they don’t hear us, until they fear us,” repeating “until they fear us” just in case you missed the point. (And you won’t.)

Many of the album’s most compelling calls for empathy are writ large, but some of its most affecting draw attention to private struggles with care and insistence. The rumbling “Suit and Tie,” for example, both confronts the vicious realities of misgendering and transphobia while also affirming the joy of living one’s true self, as Matthews shifts between third- and first-person perspective in detailing a spectrum of experiences that refuses the binaried “casket confines of their gender’s walls.” The heartbreaking “In Her House” considers another kind of confinement, detailing n abusive relationship with tenderness and anger. The spare prayer of “My Skin” insists on space and protection for herself and those like her, with cello swooping into the foreground as Matthews insists “I don’t want your thoughts and prayers, and I don’t want your tears.” What she wants – and what we all should – is freedom.

Even when Reclamation steps away from the explicitly political, Matthews retains the freedom-song orientation through rich and lovely songs that focus on the personal politics of queer intimacies and the importance of love as resistance. The soft haze of “Oklahoma Sunset,” with its chiming guitars and Irish-reel rhythms, and the affecting duet with Heather Mae on “Good Stuff,” gracefully outline the big and small pleasures of a loving relationship. Matthews celebrates a whole-self embrace of oneself and one’s partner on “Clumsy” and “I Want It All,” where a swirling folk-rock arrangement surrounds Matthews with a soaring violin and waves of electric guitars. And the “dark parts” and failures that Matthews claims as part of the full experience become more vivid on “Red” and “CA GA,” where Matthews charts the literal and figurative distance between herself and a (perhaps former) lover who can’t find the journey home promised in the aching “Some Roads.”

Befitting the album’s call-and-response between sounds and generations, Matthews ensures that the elders and ancestors both inform and animate Reclamation. On “Cancel Culture,” Matthews flips the contemporary canard into a discussion of a political and social culture that is based on justice and compassion and rooted in the lessons of the past. In the best freedom-song tradition, it is a call to action: “There’s a whole lot in our culture we could cancel if we try,” she reminds, before invoking both “We Shall Overcome” and Martin Luther King, Jr. in a final section with an exuberant call-and-response of “Drive out the darkness with the light” between Matthews and an insistent background chorus.

Other historical figures from Sojourner Truth to Ella Baker appear to offer their contributions as well, and Matthews frames the album with two direct invocations. At one end, she includes a spoken lesson from her mother about puzzle pieces fitting together that transitions seamlessly into the strutting, soul-influenced “The Bigger Picture.” And, to close the album, Matthews offers the stirring reminder of “Waking Up the Dead,” the album’s most country-forward track. With fiddle dancing atop a two-step rhythm, Matthews details how a trip to a cemetery in Pennsylvania – where she walks among the graves of “abolitionists and Quakers” – reminds her of how the past remains present for each of us and all of us. “The ghosts don’t scare me in this cemetery, no,” she insists, because “they’re singing ‘freedom…freedom at last.’”

In a new era that requires a reinvigorated remix of the freedom-song tradition, Reclamation is a necessary statement from one of the tradion’s best contemporary practitioners. It’s also a compelling collection of songs from an artist who recognizes that the message, the meaning, and the music should always walk together. Crys Matthews calls on us to “drive out the darkness with the light” of voices and songs, and I’m ready to respond. I know that I’ll keep listening to and thinking about this fantastic record all year and beyond. Reclamation is just what we need right now, or anytime.

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