Turn It Up - 8/26/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

It’s another week, so we’re back to share some things we’ve been listening to. Charles goes first, then David. As always, we’ve listed a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Shelby Lynne – “Clouds” (from Consequences of the Crown, 2024)

Shelby Lynne’s new Consequences of the Crown is something between a return to form and an affirmation of an artist who never went anywhere: Don’t call it a comeback, she’s been here for years. Twenty-five, in fact, since her breakthrough I Am Shelby Lynne, which this album recalls in both sound and spirit. Maybe it’s only because of recency bias, but I think this album is finding a place in my soul that surpasses that of its (wonderful) predecessor. Sounding not unlike if Dusty Springfield made a ‘90s R&B album and recalling the analog/digital textural juxtapositions of artists like Sarah McLachlan and Sophie B. Hawkins, Consequences is filled with songs and performances that just knock me out. Its fragmented images and descending melody make “Clouds” the one that I can’t stop playing right now. It’s a thrumming reckoning with oneself that lands neither on apology (“Ain’t sorry then, ain’t sorry now”) or defiance, instead settling into a reflective mode that Lynne delivers with every ounce of ambivalence she can find, right up to the unaccompanied “love’s to blame” that ends the song. An undeniable narrator. – CH

Cecily Wilborn – “Rocking Chair” (from Kuntry Girl Playlist, 2024)

What a wonderful gift to learn of Kuntry Girl Playlist, an album from Arkansas artist Cecily Wilborn that is contemporary country-soul at its most vibrant. (Thanks to our friend Natalie Weiner at the great Don’t Rock The Inbox for making me aware of it.) It’s a fool’s errand to pick a standout track, but one that’s particularly hitting me is the swooning “Rocking Chair,” where Wilborn harmonizes with and responds to herself over a spare, easy-rocking arrangement. With its welcoming sound and calls to the dance floor, it’s an invitation not just to Wilborn’s intended but the whole audience, or at least whoever’s left when the hour gets late and the vibe gets loose. A fantastic track from a fantastic album. – CH

Memphis Royal Brothers (feat. Jim Lauderdale and Wendy Moten) – “Brand New Heart” (from Memphis Royal Brothers, 2024)

Memphis Royal Brothers (feat. Wendy Moten) – “Ready to Rise” (from Memphis Royal Btothers, 2024)

Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell is doing heroic work in championing the legacy of Memphis’ Royal Studios and his father Willie Mitchell, who oversaw legendary recordings by Al Green, Ann Peebles, and many others. But he’s also trying to build that legacy forward into a new century, both by keeping the studio operating fulltime (sometimes with massive worldwide success) and by launching new projects like this one, built around two generations of Royal Studios personnel and featuring a group of high-profile vocalists. The highlights are two tracks featuring Wendy Moten, the acclaimed Memphis-born and Nashville-based singer whose genre-hopping career has lately found her working with country artists like Vince Gill and Tim McGraw & Faith Hill. On Memphis Royal Brothers, Moten first offers “Brand New Heart,” a gliding duet with Jim Lauderdale that could send urban cowboys and boot-scootin’ line dancers sliding across the floor. The counterpoint between Lauderdale’s genial twang and Moten’s insistent crescendos is a perfect fit – I want a whole album from this dynamic duo. Then Moten gets a solo spotlight with the gospel-drenched ballad “Ready to Rise,” a loving reminder to hold on that Moten sends up into the heavens and straight into your heart. With the Royal Studios experts affirming in a horn-driven arrangement, Moten and her background singers offer a compelling place of refuge. These back-to-back stunners from Moten are so good, and so perfectly encapsulate the two sides of the “Memphis sound” that Royal helped make famous, that the album’s other featured vocalists can’t help but get lost in her sparkling, shining shadow. – CH

Tanner Adell – “Cowboy Broke My Heart (Take 1)” (single, 2024)

You’d think if anyone would know better than to let a cowboy break her heart, it would be “Buckle Bunny” Tanner Adell. Yet here she is, admitting she’s ashamed for being played a fool and angry enough to plot burning the dude’s guitar. That’s what she says, but to me she sounds far too bereft to pull off anything more than another crying jag. The sense of loss is so overwhelming here, her melisma so fulsome, that it didn’t even register till my fourth time through that on this version of her line-dance single, she’s backed by nothing more than a lonely acoustic guitar. –DC

Lainey Wilson – “Broken Hearts Still Beat” (from Whirlwind, 2024)

My first thought seeing that title was, “Oh hell, yes! How can it be no one’s ever thought of that one before?” Well, as it turns out, Google says plenty of folks already had. There’ve been songs with that title by Maureen Russell, LibraThe1, Warm Winters and a few other artists I’ve never even heard of, and surely a few others have at least used the line. So let me revise my initial enthusiastic reaction: “How can it be Lainey Wilson is the first to get it right?” Most uses of the line celebrate survival. And Wilson goes there, too, in the double-time bridge: “Still tickin', still kickin', still breathin', still pumpin', still runnin', still dreamin'.” Still, she really leans into that “broken,” which quickly steers the song into the territory of what another songwriter once termed “wounded, not even dead.” In terms of the songs Wilson’s been writing, and the delicate vocal power she shows off here, Wilson is heading toward Dolly territory too.  –DC

AJ Lee & Blue Summit – “He Called Me Baby” (from City of Glass, 2024)

This great Harlan Howard number has been recorded dozens of times over the last 60 years or so. The best-known versions are probably from Candi Staton and Patsy Cline. Waylon Jennings’ “She Called Me Baby” is another of my favorites. and now I’ll add this lonely, spare version by AJ Lee & Blue Summit to the list. They’re a California bluegrass outfit that includes mandolinist Lee and flat picker Sullivan Tuttle (both formerly of The Tuttles). Lee sings lead, and her phrasing, where she pauses and her lonesome tone, is low-key riveting. The track’s moody groove, call it country soul-grass, gains drive as the song progresses, and the breaks from guitarists Tuttle and Scott Gates cruelly remind Lee of all she’s been missing since baby’s gone. – DC

Lawrence Rothman – “Poster Child” (from The Plow That Broke the Plains, 2024)

Missouri singer-songwriter and producer Lawrence Rothman has been around for years behind the mic and in the studio, but this decade their work has taken a rootsy turn. “Rothman’s penchant for doing something that might be considered a bit more homespun,” Chris Willman in Variety wrote last month, “became evident when they produced one of the best Americana records of recent years, Amanda Shires’ 2022 release Take It Like a Man, as well as working on tracks by Margo Price, Brittney Spencer and Angel Olsen and enlisting Lucinda Williams as a duet partner.” Their eighth album, The Plow That Broke the Plains, comes with bits of twang and a bent toward more personal songwriting, but rocks and rolls most of all. Never more so than on “Poster Child,” co-written with Jason Isbell. An accounting of autobiographical details that the record company might marshal to promote Rothman’s career—“I've had a half of dozen beatings and a thousand AA meetings. Can we use that?”—punctuated by punchy glam shrieks: “Poster child! Poster child!” Rothman sounds ambivalent, if resigned, to the marketing strategy, but rarely has “selling a share of your heart” sounded so catchy. – DC

Alison Moyet – “All Cried Out (Key Version)” (single, 2024)

If you’re like me, you let out a little squeal whenever you learn Alison Moyet has a new album on the way. Key will be her first studio effort in seven years, and it finds Moyet revisiting songs from throughout her solo career with more downbeat takes than the crowd-moving than their versions. The second single from 1984’s Alf, her solo debut after electronic duo Yazoo (Yaz here in the states) broke up the year before,  the triumphant kiss-ff “All Cried Out” was among the Moyet sides that set the British synth pop-and-soul bar, as far as I was/am concerned, in an era where the competition (Culture Club, Simply Red, George Michael, among many other) was stiff. Moyet’s new version of the strips the keyboards down to mostly rhythm, her delivery somehow sounds slower and more frantic at once, and when she first belts the title line, she really does sounds like she’s been sobbing nonstop, rocking herself to sleep, for years. – DC

Recommended reading:

-Holly Gleason on Shelby Lynne, for The New York Times

-Ann Powers talks to Nick Cave, for NPR.com

-Mark Anthony Neal on Isaac Hayes, for Medium.com

-Mark Anthony Neal on Shirley Caesar and his mother, for Medium.com

-Tanisha C. Ford on the influence of Black fraternities and sororities in U.S. politics, for Town and Country

-Justin A. Davis on Black prison activism in Memphis, for MLK50

-Jason Isbell talks to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, for GQ

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