Turn It Up - 4/29/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

We’re back again to start the week with some things we’ve been listening to. David goes first this week, then Charles, and we’ve listed a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Carly Pearce – “My Place” (from Hummingbird, 2024)

I think this is pretty nearly a perfect song, in that well-crafted, well-observed old-school way, like a modern version of “The Grand Tour” or something. It ain’t any of cowriter Carly Pearce’s business, now, to try “to picture 4 X 6s with her in ‘em [or] if she does things that I didn’t.” It’s an all-too-familiar story about the life you’ve lost set to a rhythmic undertow that simulates depression and always circles her back to the same old bad thoughts, another spin around the block for another look at what she doesn’t want to see. – DC  

Rhonda Vincent – “Please Mr. Please” (single, 2024)

Oliva Newton John’s ode to country bars with jukeboxes, good Kentucky whiskey, and some button-pushing cowboy inevitably playing that damn B-17—but redone by Rhonda Vincent as a boot-scootin’ bluegrass boogie. I did not see this one coming, but if it turned out to be Vincent’s contribution to a bluegrass ONJ tribute album, I would not be mad. – DC

Loretta Lynn – “I Can’t Hear the Music” (from Still Country, 2000)  

Critic Tom Breihan had a good piece this week on Loretta Lynn and her 2004 collaboration with Jack White, titled “Van Lear Rose at 20” (see link below). I must say I’ve never been a fan of that album. It feels more like a Jack White project than a Loretta Lynn one to me, and even on those terms comes off rhythmically clunky and a little gimmicky. Breihan likes the album more than I do, but I appreciate his observation that it pales next to any cheapo collection of Loretta classics you might find at a random truck stop and that, in the context of her singular career, Van Lear Rose “isn’t exactly a footnote, but it’s a lark…” I also second Breihan singling out “Miss Being Mrs.,” a Lynn original about the loss of her husband Doolittle in 1996, as the album’s keeper track. His essay reminded me of the songs on that same subject from Lynn’s previous album, Still Country. Some of those cuts were contributed by other songwriters—check out “On My Own Again,” written by the album’s producer Randy Scruggs, or “Table for Two” by Max D. Barnes—but my favorite is a Lynn original, the piano ballad “I Can’t Hear the Music.” I’ll admit it isn’t as artful as “Miss Being Mrs.,” and the song surely idealizes her late husband. But that’s the way loss hits people and on that score the song’s “authenticity,” if I may, only compounds its poignancy. She barely hits the highest notes, has to swallow the ends of lines in order to swell them. “When he said, ‘I love you, baby,’ that was music to my ears,” Lynn sings. Her voice breaks then, like her heart. It is hard to hear, but she makes it through. – DC

Donna Summer – “Sunset People” (from Bad Girls, 1979)

I’ve been enjoying Courtney Love’s Women, a BBC radio series where Love regales critic Rob Harvilla with telltale details from her misspent youth. Or are they all just tall tales? It’s hard to tell! In episode two, for example, she shares what (at least so far) has to be the most Courtney Love-ing-est story ever: She once auditioned for The New Mickey Mouse Club by reciting Syliva Plath’s “Daddy.” Not long after that, Love was declared legally incorrigible and sent to juvie, she says, to the same Oregon institution where her friend and twice-director “Milos” had filmed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the day room there, Courtney recalls that the black girls loved Cameo and Teddy Pendergrass while the white girls dug Nazareth and Van Halen. There were fist fights! But Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” bridged the divide. On the episode, though, Courtney throws a curveball, playing that album’s closer, because it felt like a sign to her that LA was where she belonged. “In between pretty girls,” Summers coos over a bleep-blooping Giorgio Moroder pulse. “Still sixteen but know the world” on a Sunset Strip that tempts like a searchlight marking either a red-carpet party or a used car lot. Innocence not just lost but sneered at, exhaustion amidst decadence—but oh the fun! A delightfully unexpected chapter in the Courtney Love origin story. – DC  

Miko Marks – “Nine-Pound Hammer” (from Feel Like Going Home: Deluxe Version, 2024)

We love Miko Marks, so we’re delighted that she’s released an expansion of her wonderful 2023 album Feel Like Going Home. It’s a fantastic addendum, with several new songs mapping the range of Marks’ talent and including collaborators from the Fisk Jubilee Singers to Buddy Miller. One highlight is this revival of “Nine Pound Hammer,” the work song that became a folk and bluegrass standard. Recalling her 2021 EP Race Records, Marks’ voice soars above acoustic backing from her band the Resurrectors that recalls Sun Records rockabilly as much as anything else. The song’s roots as a means of surviving a hard laboring day shine through here; Marks swoops and shouts with a cathartic spirit that doesn’t deny the workin’ woman’s blues, but shakes them aside with an insistence that she’ll live on, and rock out, despite it all. – CH

Stephanie Lambring – “Two-Faced” (from Hypocrite, 2024)

Songwriters as talented as Stephanie Lambring often perform a magic trick. They take a topic that seems familiar and – through specificity, sound, or perspective – deliver it in a way that makes it new. “Two-Faced” is a perfect example: over big drums and chiming guitars, Lambring describes her concern that both she and her partner don’t always tell each other the truth. But rather than demanding full honesty, Lambring acknowledges that it might be better to keep telling the kind of polite lies that “make the world go ‘round.” When Lambring, whose smoky alto animates her startling lyrics, sings “if you don’t have anything nice to say, say it behind my back,” it sounds not like acquiescence but instead like grown-up understanding. “Two-Faced” is a love song, after all, and it comes bursting out of the speakers just in time for windows-down season. – CH

Rissi Palmer – “Country Girl” (from Rissi Palmer: Remastered, 2024)

Wonderful news: Rissi Palmer’s 2007 debut album has been remastered and expanded. Even more wonderful news: Palmer now owns her entire catalog, which means that she oversaw this reissue and will benefit fully from it. The creator of Color Me Country and a key voice in the contemporary Black country renaissance, Palmer began her career with this striking, style-spanning collection that only sounds better in retrospect. Wide-open anthems like “No Air” and “Flowers on My Window Ledge” hang with roots-forward gems like “I’m Not of This World” and a cover of Patsy Cline’s “Leavin’ on Your Mind.” Both sonically and thematically, “Country Girl” sounds the most enduring note. Palmer’s assertion of country identity is expansive rather than restrictive, and the strutting, harmonica-and-steel-driven arrangement mixes country sounds from the past with the innovations of the post-“Dirty South” present. A great song, a great album, a great artist. – CH

Nilüfer Yanya – “Like I Say (I runaway)” (single, 2024)

Nilüfer Yanya has emerged as a really exciting young artist, and her new single might be my favorite thing she’s done yet. “Like I Say (I runaway)” is another example of Yanya’s trans-Atlantic soundclash. She throws trip-hop textures, Sade-recalling vocals, and a fuzzy grunge chorus into the mix, turning “Like I Say” into a song that never settles into one sound or groove, but rather bounces between them in a manner that befits the song’s commitment to independence and desire to make the most of one’s time. It’s a literal and figurative trip, with Yanya standing at the center of the hypnotic swirl. – CH

New Dangerfield – “Dangerfield Newby” (single, 2024)

The first release from a very exciting new project. An all-star Black string band of Jake Blount, Kaia Kater, Tray Wellington, and Nelson Williams, New Dangerfield takes its name from a member of John Brown’s revolutionary force and its sound from this rich tradition of Black music that has been brought back to the conversation in recent years thanks to the work of these musicians and others. The group’s first release, titled for the band’s namesake, is a fast train driven by Blount’s fiddle and piercing banjo from Wellington (who brought the group together). With Kater’s guitar and Williams’ bass keeping a solid foundation, “Dangerfield Newby” offers a fierce debut and loud announcement of more exciting music to come. I can’t wait. – CH

Reading recommendations:

-Craig Jenkins on Taylor Swift, for Vulture

-Craig Jenkins on Diddy, for Vulture

-Jeff Gage on country music and the opioid crisis, for Rolling Stone

-Justin Davis on St. Louis drill rap, for No Bells

-Alyx Vesey on Rap Shit, for LA Review of Books

-Lilli Lewis on the songs that shaped her, for My Spilt Milk

-Amanda Hess profiles Kathleen Hanna, for New York Times

-Oriana Mack rounds up the country acts who played on Cowboy Carter, for The Bluegrass Situation

-Tom Breihan on Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose at 20, for Stereogum

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