sentimentality

There’s a new Nanci Griffith album in the world. Every time she releases a new one I am briefly overwhelmed, taken back to 12th grade, when her music changed my life.

I haven’t always been able to tell the difference between good songs and bad, but I have always felt them deeply. I knew the words to “Folsom Prison Blues” the first time I heard it on my grandparents’ radio when I was a kid. Country music was broken by the time I started paying better attention in the 80s and 90s, though; it got reduced to platitudes, binary states. The only way to be in those “hot new country” songs was in love or in despair. Every little thing was life or death. I couldn’t help it; my fevered teenage soul took it to heart.

photo credit: Great Beyond

My senior year of high school a friend insisted that I borrow a copy of Nanci Griffith’s album Flyer, the first thing I’d ever heard that wasn’t country or pop music. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, but I kept listening to the songs, reading the lyrics as Nanci sang. The verses were dense, there wasn’t always a chorus, and the melodies and harmonies were more complex than what I had grown up hearing. Nanci’s voice wasn’t as smooth as the ones on the radio, but its cracks and unfamiliar intonations made me believe she knew what she was singing about.

And the songs…they were full of choices, full of compromises and alternate paths and resignation. They were songs about how essential it is to acknowledge how you get to each point in your life and then to press on. What could I do but fall in love with this music?

Being a bit of a completist, I dove into Nanci’s extensive back catalog, which is about as comprehensive an introduction to folk music as you can get, thanks to an album of covers called Other Voices, Other Rooms. From that one album I learned about Kate Wolf, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Woody Guthrie, and finally, I learned what the big deal was about Bob Dylan. I had a lot of catching up to do.

Eventually I exhausted my mental and financial reserves trying to get as much Nanci Griffith into my life as possible, which was just as well, because it wouldn’t be long until new albums came along. Like the brand new one I’ve been listening to tonight.

Unless you’re writing a Greek epic, do not under any circumstances explicitly invoke the muse. It pisses her off.

In a career spanning 19 albums, there are bound to be a few duds. Chalk it up to vanity projects, concept albums, the occasional overindulgence of sentimentality that evidently comes with age, and more vanity projects. She once recorded “From a Distance,” god help her. The last few Nanci Griffith albums haven’t seemed up to her usual standards, so this new one, The Loving Kind, had me worried, and not just because of the title.

I listened to it on lala.com, where you can listen to the whole thing, once, for free, without having to sign in or set up an account or fill out any form of any kind, because somebody in the music business finally figured out how the goddamn internet works.

First up is, unfortunately, just the kind of latter-day Nanci Griffith song that makes me stabby. It’s called “The Loving Kind” and is about Mildred and Richard Loving, who wanted to interracial marry the way folks want to gay marry these days. I’m all for using music for social commentary, which Nanci has a history of doing well. These days, though, it seems she feels the message has to be both oversimplified and very explicit. No shades of gray, no subtle metaphor, just straightforward this-is-what-I-think songwriting. It’s like turning the holocaust into a Disney cartoon and still believing you’ve delivered any kind of weighty social commentary.

photo credit: elmada

Another song mentions “the muse” not once but twice. Perhaps worse is something called “Things I Don’t Need,” an anti-unnecessary-plastic-objects anthem. That turns into a love song. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem so bad, but consider that the same woman once prefaced a song with a 5-minute long story about the charms of Woolworth stores and the unnecessary plastic objects therein, this new song approaches scandal.

The best new material is basically just a mediocre catalog of platitudes and generalizations (see “Party Girl” and “Sing” and “Still Life” if you’re curious). When I hear something like this from someone whose music used to be so nuanced and thoughtful, I can’t tell if they can tell the difference. It would be one thing if she’s just tired of people not getting the point and decided to bust out the sledgehammer, but I can’t be the only one who’d rather chew off his own ears than be preached to.

This isn’t just a selfish wish for a new collection of amazing songs; I think of anyone out in the world today, ready to discover something that changes the way they look at the world, and worry if this is what they find. Of course, what worked for me isn’t likely the touchstone that someone else might need. This is a lesson I have trouble remembering.

What concerns me more is another possibility: what if all the old songs that woke me up are just like these, but I was young and malleable and couldn’t tell, and now through the nostalgic fog I remember them as more eloquent, insightful and inspiring than they really were. This prospect bothers me more than it should. It doesn’t really matter; I got what I needed out of those songs when I first heard them. But if I can’t evaluate them strictly on their own terms, if I can’t get outside of my own skewed perspective, that seems like a problem.

A problem Google should be able to fix with a simple tweak of their algorithm. They already collect more data on me than I can fathom, so they should be able to apply a filter to eliminate my particular shade of rose colored glasses. Click here to denude your childhood heroes.