Down to Believing – Allison Moorer
After the beating my last pick took the obvious thing to do is play it safe but screw it, we’re off to Nashville folks! (albeit via New York)
In deciding which country orientated artist to pick, I narrowed it down from a shortlist of six artists to one of two Alisons. Should I go for Alison Krauss, gilded bluegrass royalty, someone who has more Grammys than everyone other than Qunicy Jones and Beyonce? Or should I go for more of a scrapper from Mobile, Alabama , who at fourteen years old heard the sound of her abusive father shooting her mother and then turning the gun on himself. Who was then (partly) raised by her Seventeen year-old sister, who was also in attendance at the murder-suicide, after which the pair of them both managed to carve out major music careers for themselves. As this is country it feels like the appropriate thing to do is go with her…Allison Moorer (the spelling of her name might indicate her folks were City fans, the timing works!)
Lots of country music is drenched in faux melodrama but Moorer’s life doesn’t need any additional confections. Moorer and her sister (Shelby Lynne) have used their music to both explore their lives and to propel them forward from the darkest of times.
I’m actually offering up an album which I personally don’t think is Moorer’s best, not because it has special meaning to me but because, for reasons I don’t understand, her (IMO) best album is only available to stream on Tidal. So, if you are able to listen to her second album ‘The Hardest Part’, I would commend it to you, the subject matter is darker and the guitars crunch and howl a little bit more than on this nominated album. I also considered her last album ‘Blood’ which is a kind of musical memoir to accompany the book she wrote of the same name that explored and analysed her upbringing and the death of her parents. But to get the most out that album it helps to read the accompanying book and I didn’t think it was on to try and converge the album listening and booking reading threads!
Nonetheless the album I’ve picked is viewed by many fans as the equal of either of these. Moorer writes thematically and from experience. In the case of “Down To Believing” this is a break-up album, but not any old break up. This album is a by-product of the breakdown of her marriage to the brilliant but arguably wayward Steve Earle, which also coincided with their son being diagnosed with a complex form of autism.
Earle’s fantastically caustic analysis was that “she traded me in for a younger, skinnier, less talented singer-songwriter”. Moorer is more guarded and hasn’t got into a public slanging match but this album and the fact that Earle has got through more than a few spouses over the years suggests there might be two sides to the story!
It starts with three songs focused on the unravelling of things. These feature the guitar of the producer Kenny Greenberg, a man who is well known for adding a little bit of a rock vibe to albums for a who’s who of Nashville stars. It then moves to the slower and downbeat title track as the stark reality of the choice before them kicks in. Apparently, their relationship was pretty intense, Earle has intimated that he thought he had found the real love of his life, but there is a sense from both of them that is alluded to in this song that the intensity wasn’t sustainable. The angrier and rockier “Tear Me Apart” then seals the deal in terms of the end of the relationship.
The next track, If I Were Stronger, exemplifies one of the reasons I really like Moorer, this is pretty much a cookie cutter country ballad with a very simple lyric, so its component parts are pretty unpromising. However, Moorer delivers it completely authentically and by this I don’t mean she sells it - I mean she sings it as her truth. Consequently, I think anyone who has experienced leaving a dysfunctional relationship to save their sanity can relate to the regret and guilt because though it might be simple it’s real. I think it’s one of several places where her unvarnished honesty of delivery either elevates or single handedly carries proceedings.
The second half of the album focuses on moving on and related themes. “Wish I” is not a particularly auspicious start to the second part though it has some nice slick guitar work in the last minute and a half. “Blood” is written for her sister Lynne and again is pretty simple and is undoubtedly sentimental but tied into their backdrop and their shared experience there is no doubting it’s sincerity and it’s sentimental in the best sense of the word.
“Mama Let The Wolf In” – a song about parental guilt at not being able to fix things (in Moorer’s case her sons autism) is a more bluesy number and contains an example of Rob’s theory that limiting the profanity makes it more effective when it does actually occur.
The next couple of tracks tone things down a bit with “I’m Doing Fine” more languidly suggesting moving on (or not), it’s also an example of something else I like about Moorer, which is that there is often an undertone of blue-eyed soul in her delivery which I think means she can pull off the unusual trick of being sincere and slick at the same time. “Back of My Mind” is fairly standard pop fare.
The penultimate track is a cover of one of CCR’s best songs. It’s a lovely but pretty faithful reproduction which initially made me think, why bother? But I think it’s simply that it fits with both the style of the album and its narrative arc too.
The album finishes on a seemingly downbeat note with “Gonna Get It Wrong” the melody is slower and calmer than what has proceeded but, despite the title, the lyric is a tentatively hopeful one based on self-acceptance and keeping going in the face of your frailties and imperfections. It’s a survivor’s mantra that could, in the wrong hands, sound utterly hokey, as could many of the other songs; but coming from Moorer it sounds real enough to me.
I am hoping Rob calls me out for hypocrisy with this pick because there’s several things about the production on this album that I have ranted about on other picks. All I can say is guilty as charged and it’s a measure of how much I like Moorer and Greenberg that I choose to be selectively deaf to these things :-)
I know this isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but the safer option can wait for another day. Normally for Country / Americana I like something either a bit more rootsy or a bit more ‘sophisticated’ (whatever the hell that means) but I have been a sucker for Moorer’s combination of plaintive but defiant delivery for most of her career. This pick has about a fifth of the ‘cleverness’ and innovation of my original pick for this round, but what its unpretentious story telling does have in spades is authenticity and integrity, things I really appreciate in any form of music. Sometimes I fancy myself as a bit of a clever dick with music but other times not so much. This is not music for clever dicks, it’s balm for wounded and weary souls and if that makes me a rootin’ tootin’ sentimentalist then so be it!
