(more from Nashville Scene ballot comments re 2016)
Chely Wright—-I Am The Rain: the title doesn’t mean she cries all the time; it’s a line from “You Are The River”, which, in a classic country way, develops logically and poignantly and selectively from the observable physical relationship of rains and rivers. She takes realism inside “Blood and Skin and Bone”: “I’m like a guillotine that’s lost its point in a room of petty thieves/I’m like a teenage boy with a rake in his hand, starin’ up at the leaves.” And that is because “nothing around here makes sense since you’ve been gone.” And the title is because she’s a hunk of physical reality going to waste, “after God went to all the trouble to make me this way” (incl. “gay”, as inferred here from a context subtly but never coyly provided on this album, as on 2010’s Lifted Off The Ground, where she and producer Rodney Crowell (who also contributes backing vocals and a couple of co-writes here, as does current producer Joe Henry) began to map a new country mainstream, or the old one modernized as a given: personal expression via personalized signposts pointing toward the familiar, incl. stuff maybe not talked about too much, or talked about too much, but the discipline of music can create the balance, externalizing without generalizing too much. And the careful clarity of writing and performance is never hesitant (if she doesn’t know where or if she’s going, she just says so), never murky (the sound is grounded in shades and planes of bass: maybe upright, and/or fretless electric, with just as much unobtrusive, non-chamber-y clarinet, occasional notes from the left side of an electric piano; steel, 12-string, other guitars glint and glide just fine, passing through).
Scenes shift: “Mexico” is from the POV of a truckstop waitress just this side of the border: “Every shift is different and the same….long-distance truckers, runaways and thieves…they’re all headin’ for the promised land…the dusty TV blares the local news.” No complaints: it pays okay, and she’s gotten away from her dangerous husband, but sometimes she wonders about “heading further South”. in a good way, of course. “Where Will You Be” seems at first like it could be about the Rapture—“when it happens, will you be driving your car?”—and maybe it is, but mainly it’s about “when you realize what the mess you’ve made.” Tough, but she gets more empathetic in a sequel: “You’re fighting battles in your head…we messed up what God said”—which is even more reason to give the singer a call sometime so they can hash it out. Just maybe incl. face to face.
“You” might often mean “I”, judging by her autobiography, rather than the traditional gender-avoiding gay usage of the second person; she doesn’t change “lying by her side” covering Dylan’s “Tomorrow is A Long Time”—the best version of this song I’ve heard, other than Elvis P.’s. (And she pays tribute to a cosmically beautiful female “born at midnight…Haloma, Princess of the Prairie Rain”, who also brings fire, but no complaints (so could be about clearing the underbrush, like Mother Nature intends).
But “you” doesn’t always mean herself, or doesn’t seem to in the sad ‘n’ sexy “Next To You”, though she might be talking to the mirror in a house divided in “Holy War”, a spooky modern descendant of Floyd Tillman’s late 40s winter field report, “This Cold War With You.”
