Allison Moorer – Miss Fortune

It’s no wonder Allison Moorer tagged along with producer Tony Brown when he left MCA Nashville to launch the putatively hipper Universal South imprint. Moorer made two albums of consummately soulful music under Brown’s watch at MCA, but even though “A Soft Place To Fall” (a song she co-wrote with fellow Nashvillian Gwil Owen) wound up in the movie The Horse Whisperer (and scored an Oscar nomination), the Alabama native’s records proved too edgy for country radio. Moorer’s songs, most of them co-written with her husband Butch Primm, were just too rawboned and personal to segue discreetly to and from the generic anthems of uplift that dominate country playlists.

Just as arresting is Moorer’s imperious alto — a throaty, incontrovertibly Southern instrument that some say recalls Cher (albeit Cher with great pitch), but that also conjures the cottonfield soul of Bobbie Gentry, Tanya Tucker and Sammi Smith. Threatening, as well, to the hegemony of Nashville’s niche-obsessed hit mill is Moorer’s disregard for stylistic boundaries. History-conscious yet forward-looking, her syncretism harks back to the golden age of ’60s AM radio, a time when country, pop, rock and soul singles routinely appeared on the same charts, testifying to a musical kinship unseen in popular music since.

On her third album, the wryly titled Miss Fortune, Moorer doesn’t just cross over; abetted by Nashville producer/svengali R.S. Field, she might as well have abandoned country music altogether. The record’s arrangements, which rely heavily on pedal steel, B3 and a mix of brawny and bell-like electric guitars, are still fairly rootsy. Ultimately, though, the music exudes a pop-rock classicism suggestive of a down-home cross between the second and third Wilco albums (the Faces/Stones-derived Being There and the Move/ELO-steeped Summerteeth).

What’s most striking, on first blush, are the Anglophilic flourishes that pervade the record, and not just those mentioned above, but its nods to the Kinks, Badfinger and Nick Drake as well. Such touches are the calling card of producer Field — and of former Wilco MVP Jay Bennett, who chimes in here on the likes of Leslie guitar and Lowery organ. (Neither Field nor Bennett gets their due for their canny knack for sculpting sound, particularly for how they make old Britpop feel new.)

Equally distinctive are the album’s horn arrangements — compliments of Jim Hoke, a mainstay of the Nashville jazz scene whose compositional skills critic Ron Wynn likened to those evident in the knotty reveries that emerged from Charles Mingus’ fabled Jazz Workshop. Hoke’s charts on Miss Fortune are more conventional than that appraisal suggests; but, from the Sunshine Pop of “Cold In California” to the punchy, Exile-style raunch of “Going Down” to the genetic method (a la Garth Hudson) of “Ruby Jewel Was Here”, they’re hardly less dazzling. Indeed, were it not for its hackneyed libretto — lyrics, to pick up a thread from another writer, that sound like excerpts from a script to a second-rate Peckinpah picture — “Ruby Jewel” would constitute producer Field’s most glorious evocation of The Band yet.

From their intimations of the records of everyone from Merle Haggard to Sam Cooke to Van Morrison, Moorer’s albums practically beg listeners to play “spot the influence.” Miss Fortune is no exception. Witness the swooning steel figure, straight out of Bob Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, that segues to the final stanza of “Can’t Get There From Here” (a co-write with Bruce Robison). Or the Dusty In Memphis homage, after the fashion of sister Shelby, on the sultry “Steal The Sun”. In some hands — those of, say, Ryan Adams, or even at times Jeff Tweedy — such moves come off as cute and self-congratulatory; Moorer and producer Field, however, have internalized their antecedents enough that their musical allusions are never gratuitous, and rarely less than felt.

Field’s role in the making of Miss Fortune can’t be overstated: The record is certainly Moorer’s best sounding to date. Co-producer Primm deserves his due as well. Primm also wrote the wrenching “Mark My Word”, a deceptively subdued piece of chamber pop that, were it not for Moorer’s soul-on-ice vocal, might be easy to overlook amid the dappled arrangements that surround it. The only song on the album that rivals “Mark My Word” for emotional power is the woozy, Gypsy-tinged “Dying Breed”, a Primm-Moorer cowrite that Lonesome Bob covered to chilling effect on his Things Change album earlier this year.

Not all of the songwriting on Miss Fortune holds up so well. The melodies might be unassailable, but with characters wetting their whistles, dressing to the nines and laying there naked as the day they were born, some of the lyrics come off as more than a little cliched. There’s even a “jezebel” (“a high-heeled Don Juan”) and “a harlot who was hot to trot.” That said, Moorer and Primm’s writing typically outstrips the best of what the publishing houses are plugging on Music Row (and for that matter, the compositions of Moorer’s sister). More to the point, Allison’s humid, aching alto — a voice that’s as naked as it is commanding — could redeem just about anything, even the hoariest of tropes.