Kelly Willis – Translated From Love

Here’s a parlor game to be played at your own risk: Who are the finest singers in country music today? Raul Malo, Patty Loveless, Neko Case, Ray Price? What does “finest” even mean? For that matter, what does “country music” mean? There are sharp and dull ways of asking such questions. But to stop asking is the dullest approach of all. If every voice or every piece of popular music with southern signifiers is country, then clearly nothing is.

There may have been a time when few would have asked those questions. There was a time when, yes, you might have known country when you heard it — and that was the end of it. That time is gone. But to say we’re now a more skeptical audience than we were in some unknown age of the music doesn’t clarify the shift. The point is: We do ask those questions, and considerations of what is and is not country music are very much a part of how we experience country music today. To say it’s the music that matters, not the questions, is just a sidestep.

One could lay these questions at the door of rock ‘n’ roll, which put generic boundaries into doubt as part of its mission statement (questions of who Elvis was and what kind of music he was playing were inseparable from his force). And as country music and its audience became more self-conscious and more adaptive to rock ‘n’ roll, both found new stories to tell and new sonic pleasures to enjoy.

There’s no point in being nostalgic for the generic delineations of the past. We are in the present. That’s where Kelly Willis lives. And it’s there that she sings, as keenly and movingly as any singer in the country or pop or rock present. Range is less important than the immediacy of life that her voice expresses so finely. There’s emotion in the seams of her phrasing, in the finest of scratch at the edges, in her bright sense of timing. She gets across heightened states of heart and mind, which can’t really be summed up with words; her voice has that instant force of beauty. Life is present in her voice the way light, and the absence of light, is present in the air.

“Don’t know a soul that wants to visit the moon,” she sings on the Damon Bramblett-penned first track of Translated From Love, “that bruise in the sky, that busted balloon.” This isn’t silly nostalgia for NASA’s golden age; it’s a call for playful pleasure, for imagination, for journeying, for excitement. Over a bedrock of pub rock, whirring synths facing off with slide guitar, Willis sings like she’s open to discovering anything and everything.

The Moog tones invoked by producer and longtime friend Chuck Prophet rise and fade through “Sweet Little One” and perfectly match the bittersweet optimism. “Sweet little one, don’t you berate the sun,” she sings. “It’s only coming up from being down.”

Those synthetic keys will be noted as the album’s most distinctive sound — and they are distinctive — but mostly for how seamlessly they coalesce with or echo, from one track to another, all the other sounds: steel guitar (from Greg Leisz), the Tosca String Quartet, a bright banjo, and Prophet’s witty, loose, free guitar work. On “The More That I’m Around You” they recall early Peter Gabriel, while the band just rides the same thrill as a Tom Petty hit on summer radio.

Translated From Love comes five years after Willis’ last album, the languid, largely acoustic Easy. She’s said that her focus on raising her family with songwriter Bruce Robison made writing or planning a new album difficult. She gave the reins to Prophet, wrote half the songs with him, and wound up with the most collective, collaborative-sounding work of her career.

As a producer, Prophet shapes without over-determining, and draws forth from whatever inspiration comes to mind. On “I Must Be Lucky”, the band goes from a guttural garage groove right into a dobro solo, while “Don’t Know Why” begins with a familiar Spector drum riff and then gets swept up into a lovely 1970s country melody. Prophet kicks off a cover of Adam Green’s “Teddy Boys” — an homage to Willis’ rockabilly teens — with a refracted Chuck Berry guitar lick that sounds as sampled as it is raw. And then the synth lines push the song in another direction entirely.

But more than anything, it sounds like Willis is giving herself over to the pure pleasures of making all kinds of pop. She bounces along to Michael Ramos’ Vox organ on Iggy Pop’s “Success”, with a playful call-and-response from the Gourds and a grimy bass note solo from Prophet. “Here comes my face (Here comes my face!)/It’s plain bizarre (It’s plain bizarre!)” — who would have guessed that Willis would get off on such a pure blast of fun?

The album’s best song, however, is the one that departs most from its excited spirit. “Too Much To Lose” has the shiver and sweep of a Chi-Lites ballad, but Willis sings as if she’s relishing the most desperate line — “Living in this shadow is a place that just barely exists” — because even despair can be savored for its truth. As the song concludes, she echoes the bright, quick figures of Prophet’s Telecaster with streaming phrases and the exhilaration of a gifted soul singer.

Willis turns to San Francisco songwriter Stephen Yerkey for the title track, a supremely self-conscious tune with an elliptical extended metaphor at its heart — the kind of song that’s only possible in a skeptical age. Willis’ rendition owes as much to reflection and reconsideration of the felt force of music, of what’s possible when an artist sees through all that has come before, as it does to her own instincts.

Prophet arranges twin acoustic guitars, accordion, and faded voices in the background for a delicate, stately effect. “If it goes off the seismograph, you’ll have to control the aftermath,” Willis sings with some surprise, giving the rhymes the touch they need. But the way she follows the metaphors of giving in to the unpredictable nature of love, with the feel of someone fully awake to feeling, submits to no translation. She really just sounds just like herself.