I was sitting at my computer, bored by my music collection...scrolling and scrolling through I-tunes and not discovering what it was I wanted, not knowing for a while what it was I did want. Eventually it dawned on me that I was hankering after a female singer and then, fatally, I realized that none of the female singer/songwriters in my music collection was quite the ticket. I wanted a new fiery chanteuse with a healthy dose of feminism, wit and industrial pipes.
I wanted to experience something like back in high school, when I was discovering Tori. How my angsty soul thrilled to her. I wept and sang and obsessed over her music. She doesn't get through that little crack any more, the one that leads to all those dark and painful depths that like to plague me to death, and I wish someone would.
Then there was the first time Bjork's Joga made me feel like the only person in the world who knew how lost I felt and how much I needed to be seen? How come she doesn't make music that hurts like that anymore?
What about the Dolly Fucking Parton period, when I realized she rocked the world?
How about Ani before she seemed trite and cutesy or boringly maternal or just too embarrassingly, blatantly about....womyn issues?
Regina Spektor came out and it seemed like a new voice going places, good places, then I heard Fidelity on Gray's Anatomy and wondered...
And then there's the one that touched me deepest of all - my beloved Sinead O'Connor. If you never bothered, I recommend that you immediately pick up Lion and The Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (and not for the Prince song, for the rest of the album....for the SINEAD songs...if you like those two albums, then Gospel Oak e.p. and Collaborations should be next on your Sinead to do...) Alas, I know her truly great catalogue backwards and forward.
Joanna Newsom is great, no, Ys is more than great, it is transcendant, but it's a committed listening to gain catharsis - I don't feel soothed unless I read along with the lyrics, and those songs are looooooooong...plus she has the regettable knack of seeming very very smart and making me feel very very...average.
Jane Siberry's "Calling All Angels" and "It Can't Rain All The Time"? Break my heart, they do, but I've heard them a million times...and she only gets me with some of her songs. The rest (that I've heard) border on pretensious or overly contrived. Maybe those two things are the same thing...whatever.
There's nobody in the world like Siouxsie, and I picked up her new album without Budgie, but I haven't gotten around to it yet because 1. I'm absolutely certain it's going to be a Siouxsie/Creatures type album and 2. I miss Budgie already and I haven't even heard her world without him yet. That's not a very feminist sentiment is it? But I can attest, I've seen The Creatures live and Budgie was so kick ass he's as much the attraction for me as Siouxsie is.
Neko Case is awesome, yes, but again those albums are some of the most worn in my collection.
I can't stomach Cat Power anymore. I don't know why. Probably heard it all one too many times.
Loretta Lynn wailed with Jack's guitar and it was like finding God. When that album came out years ago I found it worth it to check out her back catalogue, particularly her work from the seventies, and Loretta's another kick ass country chick, but those depths have now been done plumbed, for the time being. She's got a lot of back of catalogue to get through - just like Dolly.
I NEED SOMETHING NEW.
I bought Martha Wainwright's new CD yesterday, "I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too." If you combined the vocal talents of Bjork, Sinead, Ani, Cyndi Lauper and Neko and threw in a bit of later Tori you'd have a wierd amalgam of a voice that approximates Martha's - but she is more than just the sum of those parts. It was an album I had a feeling I was going to like, based on the review I read for it, but I didn't know she would become my new girl. The album opens with "Bleeding All Over You". The chorus 'my heart was made for bleeding all over you/and I know you're married but I've got feelings too/but I still love you'. Ahhhhh, there it is. A lyric as satisfying as 'I can feel the distance getting close/you're right next to me/but I need an airplane/I can feel the distance/as you breathe' (China/Tori Amos) or 'how come you never said you love me/in all the time you've known me/how come you never say you're sorry/and I do' (Sinead O'Connor). We need these songs, these lyrics, for all the times we feel yucky because of boys. THANKYOU Martha.
"You Cheated Me", the second track, is insidiously catchy. I still can't quite put my finger on what this song makes me think of, it will come to me eventually but in the meantime I enjoy it. This is one of the best tracks on the album. (I finally pinpointed later that there is a part in there that reminds me vaguely of The Sundays. Remember them? It's been so long, but it feels right...)
The best track is "Comin' Tonight". It's got a great hook, but even more than that her voice sells the line 'but everything you say I oppose/I blame it on my hole/It's just my role'. Hee. Later on, she sings in a worn voice that wearily echoes the truth of the lines 'I spend my time trying to forget you with/Booze and smoke from cigarettes and dope/I only seem to forget myself/It's only you that is left'. This song inspires within me an emotion I'd honestly never thought I'd have. It makes me feel like leaning out over the bow of a huge and doomed ship in order to scream "I am the king of the world!" and I wouldn't even need Leo. Better yet, leave him out. Would that a song like this could be the anthem to an epic movie, but no, we get Celine. Stupid world.
'Tower Song' is a problematic piece for me, but I may end up liking it even more because of it's flaws. The strings are beautiful, and there is a wonderful old world French feel to the percussion. Her voice wails in and around the arrangements, at times sounding fussy but in the best parts of the song letting you in on her forlorn and heartbroken world. An orphan and a woman, the child and the adult, alone. Unfortunately, her voice also mars the song, sometimes sounding unfocused and more interested in testing it's range, this breaks the spell and keeps the haunting melody of the song from arresting me from the beginning to end.
"Hearts Club Band" works the haunting angle better, and is another of the album's strongest tracks, as is "So Many Friends'. 'In The Middle of the Night' is PJ Harvey ala "Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea'. This is a strength of the song. This influence makes it unsurprisingly the darkest and most intense song of the album.
(I should have included PJ in my rambling introduction, as "Stories" is in my opinion one of the best albums of the first decade of the new millenium.)
Buy this album if you like a strong female voice, it belongs squarely within all my favorite female singer/songwriter albums (unless you're favorites are Alanis and Jewel - not because you wouldn't like the album but because you are dead to me and should look elsewhere for music advice).
I give this album a "Highly Recommended Particularly if you like more than one of the singers mentioned in my rambling intro to the review".
*****AND a postscript******
I want to give a mention to a Martha song not on the above album, but from her first, eponymous album, which I dutifully picked up after I Know You're Married totally blew me away. The song is 'Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole'. Yes, that is really the name of this brilliant song. On itunes it is listed as Bloddy Mother F*****g a*****e. In your face world! I think, maybe, I like this song even better than 'Coming Tonight'. This is the song to listen to when you are 'in your bedroom/and the mother of gloom/is hanging over your head/with her hand on your head' (Isn't it great when a song is the perfect listen during the exact activity it references? Jem's 'Just A Ride' comes to mind, or Marvin Gaye's 'Let's Get It On'. But I digress.) I love it when a song uses the word fuck in exactly the right way, making it seem like the only possible expression of an emotion. The very best line of this crazy amazing song? 'I will not pretend/I will not put on a smile/I will not say I'm all right for you/when all I wanted was to be good/to do everything in truth'.
********And a postscript from a year and a half later**********
While I still really like Martha, and things have happened since I wrote this post, like Tori put out another lackluster album and Neko put out a pretty bad ass album and I've got Florence and the Machine to kick that strong female musician hankering's ass, I've also realized something else. I think of music differently than I used to. I don't treat music like my psychiatrist anymore. That NEED for a female singer songwriter for me to RELATE to at a GUT LEVEL doesn't exist in that way anymore. I still use music as a way to process and contextualize my life, but I don't immerse into it to find myself. I think that was reserved for my early teenage years and my twenties. It's all right. I'm going different places with listening than before, and I still look for those female singer songwriters, but I don't think there every will be another Sinead or Tori for me, because I'm not the same person I was back then. At least, not in the way I heard them when I was younger. I'm so much more myself now, that the strength of a musician doesn't imprint onto me the way that it used to, so in some ways I'm more removed, but I'm also more thoughtful about what I listen to, not to mention that I am actually a lot more open minded in my tastes and far more adventerous (hip hop didn't even really exist for me until after I turned thirty. Heh. Jazz used to be a dirty word. And World? God, I used to think it was so corny...). So I guess it's a new era for me, with music. And rather than regret what is no longer, I am glad to recognize it and sort of embrace where I'm at right now.
