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Review: They Sing of Life's
Disappointments And Its Epiphanies
Loretta Lynn
Van Lear Rose
By LUKE TORN
Wall Street Journal
October 14, 2004; Page D7
As the first tentative strums reel you into Loretta
Lynn's first album in four years, and her voice leads
you into the heartfelt, folksy narrative that is "Van
Lear Rose," the most startling facet of the sound is not
the guitar textures of her improbable collaborator,
White Stripes man Jack White. It's the pure, backwoods
"country" in Ms. Lynn's voice. A striking instrument,
one that's been largely missing from the pop landscape
for nearly a generation, her succinct, Appalachian twang
burrows its way into a listener's subconscious.
That the songs, all written or co-written by Ms. Lynn,
resonate with slice-of-life struggles and epiphanies
solidifies the stature of "Van Lear Rose" (Interscope)
as one 2004's strongest and most surprising albums.
Expanding on career-long themes like fidelity, family
ties and a strong sense of place, Ms. Lynn offers an
antidote to the suburban rootlessness endemic to the
contemporary country charts with a comeback album that
rivals "American Recordings," Johnny Cash's epochal 1994
effort.
Ms. Lynn, a gutsy, righteous and fearless female voice
in an age when the music industry was tightly controlled
by men, revolutionized country music during the 1960s
and 1970s. Her string of 50-plus top-10 singles rivals
virtually anyone, while the turbulent subject matter of
hits like "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on
Your Mind)," "Fist City," and "The Pill" staked out
fiercely independent sexual and emotional terrain.
On "Van Lear Rose," Ms. Lynn belatedly expands on the
social conundrums raised in her earlier work. In one of
the album's most indelible tunes, "Family Tree," she
follows a trail of infidelity, babies in tow, to
confront her cheating husband. When his lover answers
the door, Ms. Lynn's scorn reaches a pitiful but defiant
apotheosis: "I wouldn't dirty my hands on trash like
you," she sings. "Women's Prison" is even more stark,
but this time the bullets fly. In it, she guns down her
conniving paramour in a barroom, her death sentence
carried out amid the uncontrollable sobs of her mother.
But not everything on "Van Lear Rose" carries the weight
of the world. The bouncy "High on a Mountain Top" sings
the simple virtues of country living, while the album's
title song, sporting a most beguiling melody,
encompasses the kind of country reminiscence that blurs
personal narrative into folktale.
Ms. Lynn's choice of producer, Jack White, the principal
singer and writer behind indie-rock darlings the White
Stripes, is unconventional. Approaching the project with
a gleeful disdain for the cookie-cutter methods of
making records nowadays, not to mention a belief in the
virtue of first takes that would be anathema to Owen
Bradley (Ms. Lynn's hitmaking producer), Mr. White takes
chances.
A Lynn/White duet, "Portland Oregon," pulses with odd
merriment, a prime example of the musical chemistry in
evidence: "Well Portland Oregon and sloe gin fizz/If
that ain't love then tell me what is," goes Ms. Lynn's
sassy vocal. It sports an arrangement more akin to 1960s
garage rock than the Nashville Sound.
In fact, Mr. White's production (along with the raw
musicianship of a makeshift band called the Do Whaters)
frames the songs in disparate ways, edging Ms. Lynn into
blues, spoken word, honky-tonk, bluegrass and, yes, rock
'n' roll. Not everything works to perfection: The arty,
mumbled arrangement of "Little Red Shoes" unnecessarily
obscures its narrative, while the hard-rock power-trio
angle of "Have Mercy" forces Ms. Lynn out of her
emotional timbre.
The artistic gambles, though, are part of the album's
charm, and "Van Lear Rose's" looseness and off-the-cuff
spontaneity, dismally lacking in today's technology- and
money-driven recording industry, make Loretta Lynn's
entirely unexpected comeback a rousing success.
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