Country deals with the devil - music recordings

Interview, July, 1999 by Greil Marcus

On Kelly Willis's 1999 What I Deserve, the Handsome Family's 1996 Milk and Scissors and 1998 Through the Trees, and the Flatirons' 1999 Prayer Bones, country music traces a line between love and death. That means sex, God's grace, escape, a new day beginning and a confidence that it won't be that different from the day before; it means alcohol, depression, revenge, the devil's hand, no way out, and dread at the certainty that tomorrow will be the same as the day before.

On What I Deserve (Rykodisc) it's never in doubt there will be a new day and one after that. "I don't believe," Willis sings, and the last syllable drops right out of its word as if into a deep pool of clear water. It's the first sung moment of the first song, and everything about it speaks of abandon and release. This world is made of love; death doesn't get in the door.

Willis was born in Oklahoma and works out of Austin; this is her first album since 1993, her fourth since she began recording in 1990, and it's the sort of record you can play all afternoon without getting tired of it, or for that matter exactly noticing it. That's no criticism. Unlike Willis's previous records, which by comparison seem forced and self-conscious, here the music finds its own pace, then seems to adjust itself to yours, waiting for you to come to it, sufficiently convinced of its truth to figure that sooner or later you will. That's partly the result of a certain careerist optimism in the production, but it seems to have more to do with the singer's own nerve.

Going home to her apartment in "Not Forgotten You" - a place left too small since a lover walked out of it - Willis is as much an actor as a singer, and she's an exquisite singer, not rushing a word, not allowing a word to rush her. As Patsy Cline might have done with the tune, but with the Hollywood melodrama in Cline's voice replaced by an everyday realism, Willis makes you feel a tiredness spreading from her heart to her bones. When she sings the plain line "So many got it tougher than I do," there's no self-pity hiding inside of it. The woman in the song is fully present in those few words, and it makes sense that this is as far down as Willis will go, that from there she will go on to "Cradle of Love," a number she says she started singing "before it even occurred to me that there might be something sexy going on here"; she figured it out before she recorded it. Finally the music seems to draw a smile out of the sky and then wear it like clothes.

The Handsome Family - Brett and Rennie Sparks of Chicago - are as comfortable with death as the pokerfaced '20s Appalachian singers on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. "I wish I was a lizard in the spring," Bascom Lamar Lunsford sang three quarters of a century ago, as if wishing he had a new car; when Brett Sparks sings his wife's lyrics - "There's a fish in my stomach / A thousand years old" - he sounds just as matter-of-fact. The song, "Winnebago Skeletons," from Milk and Scissors, goes on to describe an astonishing surrealist landscape, but as with Lunsford everything in the singer's heavy, lumbering voice - Johnny Cash after a night in jail - fights against the slightest intimation of weirdness. A fuzztone that could have come off a Jesus and Mary Chain record reminds you this is not an old folk song; it's how someone felt the other day on her way to work.

Life only fades away on Milk and Scissors and Through the Trees (both Carrot Top); heaven is not the deliverance Willis emphatically puts behind her on What I Deserve, but a day when you're drunk by noon. Jesus has been consciously left out of the world Willis is making; in Handsome Family music there's no suggestion he was ever born. Here there's an assumption of miasma that puts passion at bay, or rather conceals it in the apparent non sequiturs of the stories the songs almost tell, so that the absence of passion is its presence. "Your Aunt Barbara who went crazy in the '70s / Wrote poems to Jimmy Carter but forgot to feed her kids," Sparks says in a burr that makes you wonder if you heard what you heard - even though something in the singer's voice makes you doubt he'd remember to feed his own kids. As with the oldest American ballads, the flatness by which the impossible or the morbid is affirmed is funny: a joke about the joke life plays on the living. But an unspoken punch line waits at the end of every verse like a cat at the head of the stairs, and the punch line is death. As the Handsome Family's songs follow one upon the other - "My Sister's Tiny Hands" or the lovely "Last Night I Went Out Walking," which could have been written for the late Richard Manuel of the Band - the suggestion is that the joke is funny because the living are already dead.

The Flatirons don't come across like a Portland, Oregon, combo making their first album; they don't sound as young as they are, which is mostly in their twenties. On Prayer Bones (Checkered Past) you hear Texas before you hear anything else; then Neil Young's music for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, then people who've been from band to band for years until they found their sound or it found them: music that would have made a perfect soundtrack for Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez bleeding through Oliver Stone's U Turn. Singer Wendy Pate has a big voice and a small range, and she does almost as much with it as Elvis Costello does with his. Not a breath is wasted. The band - with Jason Okamoto and Scott Weddle in front on guitars - is at its best calling up dusk.