Allison Moorer – Mockingbird / Lizz Wright – The Orchard

Sometimes Lizz Wright, the minister’s daughter, and Allison Moorer, the ex-marine’s daughter, close in on a note and sound almost like the same woman, but they’re not. Their experiences of being female and southern and alive are entirely different, and so — usually — are their voices.

The Orchard, Wright’s second recording with Craig Street (this time with Calexico supporting), seems largely to have grown from a songwriting partnership with Toshi Reagon. More importantly, Wright’s third album is the first to cohere around a theme, to tell a story, however circumspectly, becoming a thoroughly modern yet classically constructed album of love songs.

The opening “Coming Home”, the beautifully languid “When I Fall”, and the simply beautiful “This Is” are — almost — as good as anything Wright didn’t write. “What is this? My heart,” she sings, and makes that discovery new, and delicious, opening herself all the way up in “Song For Mia”.

Nevertheless, the most striking of Wright’s new songs still come from elsewhere. Her reinterpretation of the early Ike & Tina Turner hit “I Idolize You” strips away the feral girl-group impetuousness of the original to discover the sophisticated tension of a far more adult relationship.

She follows that with Bernice Johnson Reagon’s “Hey Mann”, a calmly rapturous tale of joy at discovering that the high walls around one’s heart had unexpectedly been breached. To say nothing of a surpassingly gentle (and then, not!) reading Wright gives Led Zeppelin’s otherwise modestly baroque “Thank You”, nor the nod to Patsy Cline’s “Strange”. Whoever is matching these songs to her voice has fabulous ears. (“Strange”, incidentally, makes a nice counterpoint to Kate McGarrigle’s “Go, Leave” on Moorer’s album.)

Moorer’s ambitions for Mockingbird seem quite different, for her sixth studio album is her first not to be built around an often private narrative. With the exception of the title track (and it’s about as good as anything she’s written), Moorer has put aside her pen and picked through the work of other strong, female songwriters. Though she is quite serious about her work, she is also playing here.

And in producer Buddy Miller, she has, of course, found an amiable and supportive collaborator. The title track suggests some of what she has to gain, for it sounds very much like Allison Moorer. Only as the album wears on does one sense how much fun she is having as a singer when her natural rhythms are challenged by those of other writers.

There is some rashness to her selections. What is left to do with “Ring Of Fire”, and how does one make Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot” fresh? She slows June Carter Cash’s song and luxuriates in its words; the cadences of “Dancing Barefoot” seem archaic, the chances it once took now seem pedestrian, but one only learns that by listening to Moorer discover she really isn’t so savage, after all.

Ah, but, yes, she can swing right through Nina Simone’s “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl”, she can get plenty of dirt on Ma Rainey’s “Daddy, Goodbye Blues”, and she can knock Gillian Welch’s ambitious “Revelator” straight out of Buddy Miller’s living room. And Julie Miller’s “Orphan Train” in the bargain.

But it’s the country song, in the end, that Moorer keeps for her own. It takes brass to tackle Jessie Colter’s “I’m Looking For Blue Eyes”, and Moorer stretches her voice almost unto breaking. Here is the payoff for all those experiments, all those borrowed moods. Moorer says it’s the first song her father taught her, but it sounds here like a new beginning, a fresh way forward.