 Revised, for a closer look at a gem.
A visit to Eve's Prairie Warehouse sounds very good and is with an invitation to its "dark corners and the back rooms".
After the electric bath you were offered with its technology in the hands of adventurous young DJs, I took a tip from Aimee Mann. How right she was to recommend Loretta Lynn in her Amazon selection of voices to try, while Eve Selis -- often touring, but now apparently back in San Diego -- is another great star of American country music.
Eve's on the left and that's theft: not what she was doing last month, you can see where at a glance, but I pinched a Prairie pic as readily as I make "unauthorised use" of short-cut tunnels in the Métro if the destination's worth it.
'Lonesome Tonight' is one of Eve's sadder songs on 'Out on a Wire' (1998), not new but where's she lived for years as an act of faith. The girl below is the sometimes sad Jenny Queen, on the strength of her splendid debut, 'Girls Who Cry Need Cake.'
Loretta? You got a picture on July 8. The Aussie lass is also stolen, part of a snap off Jenny Queen's site taken during the album photo shoot.
You get far less leg -- sorry -- than Jenny shows on the CD cover, but then "I just don't trust good-looking blonde singers any more."
So said Temple Stark on Blogcritics, but he still liked the cake. My taste for the packaging has become evident in numerous entries, so I'm relieved he overcame his distrust of "pre-packaging" singers by the industry.
Yes, what about the music? The same Stark's not alone -- maybe for looks, maybe for images of drowning -- in writing of Jenny in the same sentence as Jewel. My ears can't follow that; blonde heads, country roots, a startling debut, so what? Still, on both 'Girls Who Cry' and Jewel's 'Spirit' (1998), there are threads of vivid imagery put into song, a sense successive stories.
Again, people compare voices, unflattering to Jewel. Truth is, they both soar when they will, write lyrics some find banal when I'd rather say young and there's nothing wrong with a naïvety that comes sometimes to sing of innocence rent by experience, the dark face of love.
Jewel's a careful craftswoman with words that fly to her music, Jenny's herself a flyer, a traveller, from Sydney to the United States, who sings also of cars and of trains, where I love listening to her, her journeys during my own.
"Jenny says the songs reflect all the places she's lived. 'I can go through the songs and say, "That's the Chicago period" and pick which place they were inspired by.' But she also concedes those rainy Sydney days inspired her to write. She laughs, 'It's so weird, the sound of the record is kind of American. For me there's the influence of the 70's California Gold sound and bluegrass but I think I'm just a moody person and rain brings out the creative side. Every time I pick up a pen to write something it's always melancholy, I have to fight myself to write upbeat songs.'
"Even though the Jenny Queen on the other end of the phone laughs with ease, she recounts a story of talking to pedal steel guitarist and Laughing Outlaw labelmate Jason Walker about how he exorcised horrible experiences through song. 'It's like therapy. I sorta see how that works.' And she says there no effort transforming herself into the album's plaintive figure when she performs. 'For me, most of them are heavily autobiographical. I do find that they're such intensely personal songs when I first started playing them, in the middle of a song I'd think, "Oh, God, that's a very personal revelation",'" Jenny told Andrew Tijs at Critical Condition.
That was a long quote from an interesting interview by a fine listener, who was also told the "cake" was "a riot," you might find out why yourself.
 Beginning with country musicians, what Eve Selis would herself call "Americana" and women very good at handling the blues either as a strong musical influence or an occasional state of mind, proved a start to ranging through more soul-baring singers, who often take the simplest of tales -- usually their own -- for far more than being "like therapy" as Jenny put it.
How do you feel at a concert, with a woman and a group of fellow musicians in the lights, giving you inside stories from her guts you might expect more from the half-seen face of a friend in dim, warm lamplight late at night? This kind of song-writing takes plenty of guts to perform and it shows; after such performances, if you're lucky enough to say "Hi", it's obvious the girls may be nice about autographs and have people to sell their CDs, but they want quiet and no silly questions, like any artist who gives so much.
Jenny Queen, Eve Selis and others like Liz Phair, mentioned before and a woman to return at length like Jewel, clearly share a view the last expresses at her own place...
"...refusing to be pigeonholed. 'I made a promise to myself at quite a young age that I would be honest in my writing,' she explains, 'because it's very, very dangerous to be famous and have to maintain a myth about yourself. You're going to spend your entire life trying to support this carefully crafted, false image of yourself. And the truth will come out, because you live in the public eye, and that's just the way it is.'"
That's exactly how it is. Jenny, whose ballads are often slow and tender with memorable melodies, and Eve both partner up with men, the first Sam Shinazzi, the second Marc Intravaia, to help set their thoughts to music, but the latter pair are something else!
Eve and "Twang" Intravaia are great guitarists and while it's often not straight rock they do, their double act of two lead guitars playing each other off in harmony, contrast and putting a magical weft and weave into the Selis sound whipped my mind back to my late teenage faves at their height on stage and in their first albums, before one of the two fellers quit: Wishbone Ash.
The obstinate persistence of Wishbone Ash is almost as "bad" as Mick Jagger getting rave reviews in some of today's papers, and has little relevance here but for those ready to do themselves a kindness either of memory or discovery with the likes of a "classic DVD".
Nevertheless, whether it's "classical" guitar, rock "legends" or women who write simply of ordinary life and high times and hard ones, such musicianship, such closeness of mind and body with room for imaginative improvisation is a tremendous asset, gift and the essence of jazz, without the label.
Bluegrass for sure, it's there with the distinctive twangs of the country sound, the strong sense of roots in small towns and broad open lands, lyrics that cut straight to the heart, folksy rhythms when wanted, the non-intellectual faith of souls far from simple but tuned to nature's ways make both stars like Eve Selis and potential ones like Jenny Queen, given far too hard a time by some critics who disapprove a failure to produce a first album that's less than a meteoric trip to the top like Jewel did.
Jenny is very direct. She says whom she loves (Lucinda Williams and Gram Parsons), admits to such influences, and delivers a singular and professional debut. Home lies 'Between the Riverbank and the Highway', she sings, always a starting point, a resting point, 'Drowning Slowly' -- the first song -- is on "a high wire", the kind of place Eve lives and reaches raw nerves.
With 'Due South' next, the album says "this is me" and she sings
"So I'll bring the pills and you bring the wine
We'll run her until we cross the state line"
and there's a sting to the end of that tale and how Jenny sings it ... let's not give it away. More like this from a girl with her feet on the ground who wishes she "could walk on clouds" and has a very competent band well produced by bassist Tony Buchen and she'll clear the air, find the stars.
Selis wouldn't claim originality either when she hands out blues by the bucketload as part of some albums, and of their voices and lyrics, there's very little comparison. Jenny can be mellow and rich, Eve can belt it out when in the mood.
So they're blondes, unlike other contributors to one "iMix". I've several of those in preparation, substantial and wide-ranging ones for the iTMS I'll contribute some day to the music store here in France, perhaps elsewhere.
All have a special theme, each a little off broad paths, I hope, unlike some of the singers logged here, already famous.
I once said it, I think: when you're really brought down by a rush of the blood and a deep ache of the heart, as happens to most of us, because it's the end of an affair or someone can't reciprocate what you feel, the last thing you need is a cheery, oblivious, "That's life, you'll get over it, so stop crying!"
It is indeed life and probably you will, but if a musician sings she knows how you feel and it's horrible and you don't want to wallow, spread the gloom around or jump out of a window, but accept it and mourn it and move on, that's much kinder, that's sharing.
Jenny does that sometimes, not always as melancholy as she reckons herself, there's a bright and lighter side to a song like 'Maybe the Moon', while some cello work on 'Ten Feet Tall' by Deepika Bryant is an example of how that instrument is often so nearly a speaking voice. Eve too shares what can be tough.
Selis will use brass players when she fancies, Queen's more subdued and I've written more about her, while very strongly recommending the other with a focus on an "old" album always new to someone, but both sing yes, maybe the moon. Why not? It wanes and it waxes, so do our lives, and my 'iMixes' aim to be offerings people can pick what they like from to live out the now and move on, always a future.
'Tough Love' is just one of them, put together by somebody who's proved only too clever at a "carefully crafted, false image of yourself" and of others too, to learn, as such musicians have found and tell us, to sing false is to be on your own.
With my apologies to Temple, I'll trust some pretty singers, never mind what colour.
Country music, the Wikipedia reminds us, is a huge genre; Loretta Lynn was "arguably [its] biggest star in the 1960s and 1970s," not that I knew that then, and it's good to see quite a number of women on the growing list there.
Loretta's "comeback" last year with 'Van Lear Rose' an excellent fast track to hard reality's nasty knocks, the nitty-gritty details of everywoman and everyman that constitute many "country" songs.
We can escape life into music, but the enduring nature of country and the so-called alternative country now much on the airwaves and the Net attests partly to the power of natural, simple and sung things to kick us straight back into life.
After a couple of thematic entries, chances are you'll find me lingering on individuals because to mention Jewel is a trip from prairie to the poets, certainly once words that can read as clever twists but rather flat on a page take on great depth and good sense set to music.
 As with many songwriters, that's part of Jewel's art:
"Lend your voices only to sounds of freedom
No longer lend you strength to that
which you wish to be free from
Fill your lives with love and bravery
And you shall lead a live uncommon
I've heard your anguish
I've heard your hearts cry out
We are tired, we are weary, but we aren't worn out
set down your chains, until only faith remains
Set down your chains
And lend your voices only to sounds of freedom
No longer lent your strength to that
which you wish to be free from..."
Jewel's work and growth since have brought rave reviews, but 'Spirit' kept me going for two more hearings today, absorbing the eastern touches (tabla percussion, lyrical notions) and feeling reason to heed such advice as to lend no strength to what I seek freedom from. It's tempting to fight what you won't take; so Jewel's clear in pointing out this drains your own strength; there are wiser ways.
I've a soft spot for an album where 'A Life Uncommon' (also a DVD title) makes for a quiet anthem and there's plenty more food for whatever gives us a sound spirit when mind and body are attuned yet Jewel makes none but fleeting references to any god, in one song a "plastic Jesus" stuck in a corner.
Jewel was apparently raised a Mormon until she was eight, but you wouldn't guess that from some sexual suggestions made in a much earlier song about her looks the better to slay a vile beholder.
Oddly perhaps, given a collection worthy of the title, singing 'Spirit' nearly did for Jewel, she said later in a piece at her place: "I wasn't sure if I was going to come back, to tell you the truth. I was so tired and burnt out."
That she has come back, increasingly observant, often turning songs about others into her own to spare them any embarrassment by being too direct, is a testimony to an ability she's developed in the past seven years to pace herself and know where limits lie. In talk of laying down chains, she's scarcely quoting Karl Marx and his apostles, but what she means can make for a "life uncommon".
Wow, a bonus. The K stands for Kilcher, nicked by eclectic Beth under a subheading 'Mystic Ether', who explains that since she pinched it, well ... you've got the picture.
Three's for luck, you can also sometimes have faith in pretty blondes hiding behind dark glasses and the mystic in Jewel is unlikely to object (though objectionable critics might) to a reminder she publishes poetry, such as 'A Night Without Armor', seeking to do without the music.
So happy listening. Regardless of whether they're soul musicians as a genre -- Jewel obviously isn't -- I'm undoubtedly set to stay with those who speak volumes to my own for a while.
7:54:51 PM link 
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