Patty Loveless – On Your Way Home

Patty Loveless has been creating great country music for so long it’s easy to take her for granted. It’s been fifteen years now since her first big record (a cover of the 1967 George Jones hit “If My Heart Had Windows”), and damn near twenty since her first chart appearance. Along the way, her husky and bluesy alto, gut-punch phrasing and twenty top-10 country hits, have earned her a spot in the country pantheon alongside Tammy and Loretta, George and Merle. At this point, you could make a strong case that she’s the best singer, gender or genre be damned, who you might still hear on mainstream radio. No question her vocals are the most old-school country; as the 46-year-old singer sums it up near the end of On Your Way Home, “I hate to think I’m the last of the last in a long lonesome line.”

The new album finds Loveless and Emory Gordy Jr. (her husband and producer) walking, once again, that very line. The pair has crafted an undeniably mainstream sound, with plenty of speedy electric licks and whirling fiddle work, but one that still lands her closer to the acoustic Mountain Soul, her stunning 2001 bluegrass album, than to, say, Long Stretch Of Lonesome, perhaps the best of her many strong contemporary Nashville records. Plenty of the finest tracks here — including the Rodney Crowell-penned first single “Lovin’ All Night”, in which an insatiable Loveless calls in sick so she can keep lovin’ all day, and a rolling-and-tumbling cover of Buddy & Julie Miller’s “Lookin’ For A Heartache Like You” — are scooted along by brisk drumming and pining pedal steel.

Still, her best moments are almost always her ballads. In the title track, Loveless confronts a lover who’s always coming home late (“The truth is going to set you free/If you keep on lying to me”). And on a version of “That Ain’t The Grandpa That I Knew”, Loveless tugs at the confining lace collar of a new dress while she gazes one final time upon a deceased patriarch. “They all say he looks so natural,” she moans, “but all I see’s a cold dark hole.” Another one before me gone, you can imagine her thinking, and still no one but me behind.