Linda Thompson – Versatile Heart

It has been quite a summer of Thompsons. Richard released his latest album, Sweet Warrior, in May. Son Teddy followed in July with Upfront And Down Low, a collection of country classics. And the first week of August brought an archival release of In Concert, November 1975, a live recording of Richard and then-wife Linda (for the moment available in the U.S. only as an import). All of which led to the mid-August release of this, only the third solo album from Linda Thompson in a career that now spans 40 years. Versatile Heart shows again that she has put those years to good, if not always happy, use.

Her songs are well-crafted, but they’re also revealing and unvarnished; the honesty and clarity that have always shaped her singing carry over to lines such as, “You say you love me/I bet you do/Too bad you never told me so.” “Do Your Best For Rock ‘n’ Roll”, a funereal honky-tonk shuffle written with Teddy, sounds like a ready-made classic. The album is rounded out with songs by her daughter Kamila, Rufus Wainwright, the folk standard “Katy Cruel”, and Tom Waits’ “Day After Tomorrow”, a letter home from the front that Thompson uses to gently illuminate the grief of this war and all others.

Illumination is the principal strategy of Thompson’s singing, and it’s the key to this frankly marvelous album. Although the dysphonia that has afflicted her for decades still keeps her from live performance, she sounds great here — smart, funny and warm, vulnerable but tough. The wisdom in “Go Home” sounds earned, but not bitter; I believe the word for this kind of thing used to be “grace.”

Indeed, this is a fully graceful record. On “Give Me A Sad Song”, Thompson sings, “I’m in a class of my own.” In context, it carries an ironic weight. Out of context, it is just plainly true.