Shawna Virago -Blood in Her Dreams

David reviews the latest album from Shawna Virago

Shawna Virago – Blood in Her Dreams

I first heard Shawna Virago earlier this year when some algorithm or other kicked up her non-album single version of Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home.” I must confess I’d never encountered Virago’s name or music before that, but I was instantly pulled in by the empathy she poured into the song and by how smartly she delivered its lines and melody. Often, when people dare to tackle “Sing Me Back Home,” they over sing it; they try to outdo a song that is bigger than they are. Virago, her voice plaintive and plainspoken, sings it simply, relying on the spare melody and lyric to do the work, and on the rusty-but-bright texture of her voice.

A bit later, I learned Virago is a San Francisco-based singer-songwriter and a transgender woman who’s been performing, as she notes in interviews, as her “authentic self” since the early ‘90s, and I was impressed anew with that Merle cover. It had never occurred to me to think of that old country song as a Bay Area-urban, queer-country anthem. I’ve heard “Sing Me Back Home” probably as often as any song I could name. Virago let me hear it for the first time again.

Shawna Virago’s third album, Blood in Her Dreams took her some two years to make but feels like the record she’s been building toward for decades. At least two of its songs, “Bright Green Ideas” and “The Ballad of Miss Sally Texas,” were included on her previous effort, 2016’s Heaven Sent Delinquent, in arresting voice-and-guitar-only versions. Reprised here, and with a full-band roaring behind her, they come off not so much reinvented as fully realized.

I say, “full band,” but one of the reasons it took Virago, along with her co-producer and engineer Grace Coleman, so long to complete the project is that—as guitarist, bassist and harmonica player—Virago pretty much is the band, with the exception of Lien Do who adds a lively pulse behind the kit throughout. The tracks have been built a layer at a time but, delightfully, sound like they’re capturing a set from a dive-bar band that knows what the hell it’s doing.

Virago’s punky queer roots rock calls to mind any number of possible alt.country influences. I hear Billy Zoom in her sunny-yet-surly electric guitar licks—and X’s attack generally throughout, on album closer “The Barman’s Daughter” most of all. I hear Springsteen in her harp playing, particularly in “Ghosts Cross State Lines” which sounds like its border crossings surely include Nebraska. To my ears, her sound and songs feel on intimate terms with Alejandro Escovedo’s wild elegance, Dave Alvin’s dusty smarts, and also with San Fran singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet’s humanist poetry. Here and there, hand claps will slap a tune into the next gear. A charming girl-group callback, that, but also a poignant stand in for an entire community of friends and frenemies, lovers and former lovers, influences and collaborators, that has had Virago’s back all along.

The lives of that community—desperate and imperiled, loved and loving—is what Blood in Her Dreams is about and, her album’s thrilling sonic virtues aside, Virago’s specialty is her storytelling, at once LGBTQ+ specific and always universal. Rollicking opener “Climb to the Bottom” sets the scene and theme alike, a demimonde descent allowing for recognition and fulfillment. “I found myself in a waterfront bar where they drink whiskey by the dipper,” Virago sings ruefully. “It was filled with faces no mother could love and no princes would find a glass slipper / I took my place with the ragged crew of the loser’s squad…” Now that, my friends, is an entrance.

The entire album highlights Virago’s gift for images or conversations that conjure have-nots worlds and for the aphorisms to negotiate them, whether via clever surprises or shocks of recognition. Just a few examples: “She was dancing on the porch to the music of mosquitoes hitting the screen” (from the title track); “For the life of me now, I don’t know what’s worse—a country jail or a country church” (from “Highroad No. 6”); “We did the Hustle, we did the Twist, as we danced around the obvious” (“Somewhere on the Border”); “He said, You’re quite a lady. She said, Maybe” (from “This Girl Felt Hounded”); and “His well-hung tongue” (from “Bright Green Ideas”); all just for starters.

My favorite track on the album, and one of the best story songs I’ve heard in a long time, is “Eternity Street.” It begins with two gay punks busking on the pier (“We took on the world—and the world Did. Not. Care.”), then flipping off sailors threatening to kick their asses. We see the pair first meeting in one of San Francisco’s old punk clubs, Virago’s friend “throwing elbows and kicking your steel-toed boots.” The song keeps going like this, finally revealing a spare verse I will never shake:

“The sun forgot to rise in that room, filled with fever and your IV drip

“There was a nurse that looked the other way, as I put that joint to your lips

“I kissed your still pretty face, and when I left, I took your boots by the laces…”

All through Blood in Her Dreams, Virago shrinks her hard tales to a particular indelible moment, then opens them wide again onto a whole world of grief and hope in which she demands to be seen and which she is determined to call home.  

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