Tywanna Jo Baskette: edgy country music, without bright lights and big hair

Interview, Sept, 2003 by Stephen Mooallem

While Tywanna Jo Baskette has spent her whole life in Nashville, she might as well be a world away from the country music capital. Her debut album, Fancy Blue (Sweet Tea/Terminus), is crafted in the Southern tradition of quirky outsiders like Vic Chesnutt and Victoria Williams, but draws on everything from Disney musicals to Antonioni films and Smiths records--as well as her own life--for inspiration.

Baskette's songwriting is stunningly direct and deceptively complex: "Pop Pop," for example, sounds like a nursery rhyme, but it is actually about her father's death in 1998 from lung cancer. (Her mother died from the same disease in 1985,) "People think it's a happy song, but it's really like, 'Pop! Pop!' My father is dead--everything is gone," she explains in her tiny, whispery voice. The song ends with what sounds like a giggle, but onstage it brings her to the verge of tears.

Baskette can't play an instrument, so she sings her melodies into a microcassette recorder, reeling off couplets about good underwear, bad valentines, and inconsolable loss--often in the same verse, always with a scarred beauty, "I consider myself a writer more than a singer," she says. "It's a way to keep things that aren't there anymore with me forever."

Stephen Mooallem is Interview's Music Editor.