FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Ann Savoy, Zoe Boekbinder, Jason Ringenberg, and More

Sometimes — this morning — one is given to suspect that we are little more than aggregations of the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, stories that haunt and inform and seek temporarily to connect or distance us.

Those are the best songs, in any event, the true stories, even if that singular, transitory truth is carried only by the whisper of a single phrase.

And sometimes the story is just the beginning: “Hello.” Or “Goodbye.”

Virginia-bred singer and visual artist Ann Savoy married into Cajun music royalty four decades and forty-odd albums ago. That immersion didn’t entirely wipe away all the other songs to which she was drawn, a duality given form by her glorious 2006 album of duets with Linda Ronstadt, Adieu False Heart.

Another Heart is, in part, the long-delayed second album they didn’t get to make when Ronstadt was unable to continue, with the impeccable Dirk Powell producing and playing needful instruments. Bruce Springsteen’s “Stolen Car,” originally worked up for those sessions, is reborn here as a duet with Rhiannon Giddens. Not angry, just sad and beautiful and filled with longing for what might have been.

The whole album is a bit of that, looking back at what might have been. Or autobiography. Or just songs Savoy likes, the new and the old. The Kinks’ “Waterloo Park” serves for a reminder of early ’70s trips to London (good grief, she met Paul McCartney), “Tin Angel” pays homage to Joni Mitchell, and she closes with Donovan’s “Lord of the Reedy River.”

The new songs seem less constrained. “Gabie’s New Year’s Lament” was written (and sung) with her daughter, newly returned from Paris and struggling to downshift into rural Louisiana: “won’t be no sequins tonight.” The Appalachian “Something’s Got a Hold On Me” comes from Carl Jones, the father of ex-daughter in-law Kelli Jones (like any good bohemian mother Savoy keeps the good ones, regardless), who contributes background vocals. Mostly, though, this is a love song — to music, to life, to family — beginning with the opening “Cajun Love Song,” written for and about her husband, Marc Savoy, who all those years ago convinced a Virginia gal to follow her heart south.

Relocated to upstate New York from New Orleans by Hurricane Ida and COVID, Zoe Boekbinder recorded their new Wildflower, funded in part by the Canada Council for the Arts, with producer Megan McCormick in a studio free of cis-men. One hopes for some near future in which that personnel is neither novel nor necessary to mention, but that’s not the world in which we live, nor is it the statement the artist wishes to make.

The temptation, as a cis-man of a certain age, is to admit one is not the intended audience and move on.

But.

Wildflower is filled with kindness and compassion, with tenderness and yearning, with deeply felt humanity. The playing throughout is delicate and certain and unafraid. The opening “Cover Up the Moon” has the texture of early Cowboy Junkies, but the balance of the album comes with the living room self-assurance of the first Sometymes Why release.

Boekbinder’s last full-length, Long Time Gone (ND review), was co-written with nine men incarcerated in New Folsom Prison, which certainly informs the remarkable redemption of “The Rest of His Days,” a story of forgiveness shared by victim and felon. It’s the kind of brave and nuanced song one associates with late-’50s political folk. “Hold My Hand” arrives with delicate traces of a swaggering rockabilly rhythm, and lands on the singular lines, “I miss you / but I don’t need you around” and “Relax your fist / and hold my hand.”

“I Tried to Be Good” works through an abusive relationship with considerably more sorrow — for everybody — than rancor. Forgiveness without suggesting codependence, though it is possible others with lived experiences may hear it differently.

Throughout, Boekbinder’s voice is rich and varied, set among drums and banjos and guitars and gathering voices. The whole thing is rather like stumbling upon a field of wildflowers in an abandoned subdivision.

Jason Ringenberg and Victoria Liedtke have gone wandering through a different kind of ruin, traipsing through the far reaches of the Porter Wagoner-Dolly Parton back catalog for More Than Words Can Tell. (By quick count only three of these 11 songs went top-20.)

Like Porter, Ringenberg is a tall, lean fellow, given over to rhinestones, gifted with a voice equal parts cornpone and desperation. Liedtke is a well-travelled, well-trained singer, originally from Oklahoma but a longtime New York City resident currently settled in London. She can be found online credibly covering Julie Miller and the MC5.

No matter how attentive they stayed to the original arrangements, she’s not Dolly and he’s not Porter and that’s not the point. The songs are well-chosen, just familiar enough (like “Carolina Moonshiner”) to echo the 1960s and early ’70s while unearthing album tracks like the spectacular opening “Life Rides the Train” to tug the whole package into the present.

And they sound terrific together. Liedtke has a warm, flexible voice that utterly sells the treacle of “The Fire That Keeps You Warm” and brushes nicely against Ringenberg’s drier tones on, say, “The Last Thing On My Mind.”

It’s a tricky balance, singing these songs with respect but not undue reverence for the monaural fetish objects of the past. They make it sound effortless.

Finally, and confidential to the Black Keys: If you’re going to call your album Ohio Players, we’re going to expect you to bring the funk.