The Women of Farm Report
Glen Rock, PA – Women. Know what I’m saying? Women.     Like my first girlfriend Jamie. The day we broke up, I found her in my bed with my brother and my coke. Or Rhonda. I married her in 1983. The next May I stuck my foot in a mower and turned my right big toe into hamburger. While I was lying in bed all summer with no one but my bong for company, she was off with some neurotic book editor, balling like a malevolent bunny. She brought me home a little present from the cheapest hooker in Fells Point, whom he was also "seeing" at the time. Then there was Aspen, the lissome lass of my dreams. Lovely beyond the avarice of procurers, she was also the sort of extraordinarily postmodern feminist or extraordinarily postfeminist modern for whom the most profound form of human liberation is the sex industry. She just wasn’t comfortable around men with her clothes on. Or let us contemplate Moola, who produced the following dazzling syllogism: "Women don’t count because I’m not a lesbian. I can’t be a lesbian, because I only get down with women when I’m drunk. Nothing counts when you’re drunk." The conclusion? Stay drunk. We might term this the Roy Cohn school of heterosexual identity.

But in what passes these days for our culture, even farmers such as myself can be lobbed into the psychiatric archipelago. After years of talk therapy and adventures in brain chemistry, I came to see that my own rampant assholery had something to do with these various contretemps. I am jealous and judgmental; I have not always been a paradigm of sobriety; I am not a Democrat; I listen incessantly to hardcorn country music; I watch the Redskins on television every Sunday; I have a complex relationship with my mother; I have an obsessive/compulsive disorder; I have been abused and degraded and tried to get better by degrading and abusing y’all. Um, sorry.

At any rate, SSRIs have helped reconcile me to the female of the species. But I live still with my regret. Strolling with studied casualness through the bounteous garden of sexuality, I have stepped on some flowers. I’m going to make it up to the entire gender in this very review, in which I will praise a whole series of women to the skies: not just for their beauty, their brains, their ingenious definitions of "fidelity," but for their achievement within the field of country music.

As I said last time out, Emmylou Harris’ album Wrecking Ball (Asylum) is one of the best albums of the last decade: a gorgeous cycle of songs made haunting by the huge and idiosyncratic production of Daniel Lanois. Her new Red Dirt Girl (Nonesuch) is superficially similar, but is perhaps an even greater achievement. The production, by Malcolm Burn, who engineered Wrecking Ball, has a huge bottom end and a hint of techno: you might call this industrial bluegrass. The atmospheric elusiveness of the instrumentation is exactly the right counterpoint to Emmylou’s brittle yet immensely expressive soprano.

There is nothing on this album with quite the crystalline perfection of Emmylou’s version of Lucinda Williams’ "Sweet Old World" from Wrecking Ball. But then that is, like, the greatest song ever written. Emmylou wrote the songs on Red Dirt Girl herself, and they amount to a true suite, an entirely coherent single work of art. You can trace rhythms and plotlines through the whole album. Emmylou unfolds these things systematically but organically. The songs are about obsessive love punctuated with moments of lightheartedness or ecstasy.

You can listen to this album on any level you like. If you put it on behind dinner, you’ll just dig it as some gentle atmosphere. But it wonderfully repays intent listening as well. On what is perhaps the loveliest song on the album, "Michelangelo," Emmylou sings this:

Emmylou is the greatest harmony singer in the history of country music, and she sings harmony on one of the songs on Ryan Adams’ album Heartbreaker (Bloodshot). Even though Ryan Adams is not a woman, I’m going to review his album because it is nearly as great as Emmylou’s, which is about as great as it gets. Essentially a relaxed folkie with an occasional tendency to rock, Adams deploys an absolutely distinct, slightly off-kilter melodic and thematic sense from the first song, "To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high)." The stuff is a pleasure to listen to, but something smart and cool is coming in under the radar.

The songs on this album, even the rockers, are drenched in silence. The arrangements are so spare that they’re almost not there. Where Emmylou’s album has a fuzzy opacity that lives almost below the human audible range, Adams’ is transparent all the way down. And you have the sense that he could make any kind of music he liked, so that he chose this stripped-down folk idiom dignifies it.

And then there’s this, which shows me that someone understands:

Let’s say that, like me, you’re always on the lookout for the next Tammy Wynette or Loretta Lynn: commercial country artists with great craft and great emotion. You could do a hell of a lot worse than Terri Clark and Patty Loveless.

Terri Clark always gives good attitude. She dresses like Dwight Yoakam (okay, except for the black bustier, or at least so one supposes). Her Fearless (Mercury) is a perfectly realized commercial country album, certainly her best. Clark cowrote most of the songs (including three with Mary Chapin Carpenter, which are really wonderful). They give you a twist on the basic country themes and riffs, and at their best, as in "Empty," they are both polished and moving.

Patty Loveless has fairly quietly amassed the best career of any woman country singer of her generation. The way she sings even a single note has the whole tradition bundled up inside it. Consistently for the last 15 years, her songs are among the best on country radio, and her interpretations of them cannot be improved upon. One of many signs that she’s ascending into the pantheon is a lyric from Rebecca Lynn Howard, one of the very best girl singers coming up behind Patty’s generation. On her self-titled debut album from earlier this year, Howard sang, "I got Patty on the radio; it sure is good to hear her." Notice that no last name is needed: like Patsy, like Hank.

Back in the mid-80s I saw Patty Loveless at a county fair in Virginia before she broke and already you could see that she was the real deal. Plus, she was already singing the all-time great song, "Timber, I’m Falling in Love."

Since then, she’s been remarkably steady and has ignored trends and hewed to a trad country line. Strong Heart (Sony) betrays the fact that she’s noticed the Dixie Chicks (who hasn’t?), but is one of the year’s best country albums. There are liable to be five singles, and there are plenty of good candidates.

Here’s another pair, this time in a folksy vein: Kasey Chambers and Stacey Earle.

Stacey is Steve’s sister and sings like a slightly less feral Iris Dement. Like her bro, she writes a good song. But she has a much lighter touch with a melody and lyric than he does, and Dancin’ with Them That Brung Me (E Squared) is fun, which is good.

Kasey is a teenaged Aussie who shows remarkable maturity as a songwriter and singer. If Lucinda Williams were a little girl instead of a shattered woman, she’d sound like this, maybe even write these songs. The Captain (WEA/Warner Bros.) displays an odd sort of progression from folk rock through a series of more and more traditional country idioms. There are a couple of songs here that could easily be on country radio, and that would be a break both for her and it.

Mollie O’Brien is quite the unique specimen. There’s no fitting Things I Gave Away (Sugar Hill) into any genre. O’Brien, really a very beautiful singer who sounds something like a hyper-mellow Bonnie Raitt or Susan Tedeschi, seems absolutely at home in the blues, country and folk. And as the album goes along, she reveals herself as a torch or jazz singer as well. But this thing doesn’t feel at all random; it is held together by a single sensibility.

Mollie’s sweet album is a perfect soundtrack for my happy marriage to Wanda, the delightful Bitch-Goddess of Love. Women. I fuckin’ love ’em. Don’t you?