[情報] Joan Baez - Dark Chords on a Big Guitar
AMG: ****
Six years is a long time to go between albums, especially for an artist who
has recorded as sporadically as Joan Baez has over the last
decade-and-a-half. And while her last outing, Gone From Danger, with songs
by Dar Williams, Richard Shindell, and other contemporary
singer/songwriters, was a milestone for Baez, it was merely an appetizer
for the depth and weight that is Dark Chords on a Big Guitar. Here Baez
uses her uncanny gift for song selection to choose material from a
different generation of songwriters. She's moved away from the precious New
England types, and looked instead to the moodier, murkier, sketchier
material by scribes who've been comfortable walking the edges for awhile:
Greg Brown, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Ryan Adams,
Caitlin Cary, Joe Henry, Josh Ritter, and even chart-topper Natalie
Merchant. Produced by Mark Spector, Baez used her road band on the album;
it includes the criminally under-noticed Duke McVinnie on guitars. Brown's
"Sleeper," with its quietly transcendent narrative of love's revelation,
opens the record only to dovetail into the brokenness, desperation, and
prayerful entreaty for love that is Adams' "In My Time of Need." Cary's
"Rosemary Moore" is a Patsy Cline-meets-the-Cowboy Junkies-styled country
lounge tune. What these first three songs reveal is that even though her
voice is no longer a huge, ringing instrument, Baez is a better
interpretive vocalist than ever before. Because of her reduced range and
reedier tone, she seeks new ways to get inside her material and does so in
startling ways. While she may no longer have the vocal range to rouse an
entire generation to action en masse, she more than succeeds at getting the
listener to delve deeply into a song, to encounter it in the very fiber of
her being, and look into the mirror to examine what truth it holds. Dark
Chords on a Big Guitar is not simply a title; there are a lot of electric
guitars here that provide atmospheric sounds and ambiguous, sensual
textures on this record. While Baez is not a rock singer and doesn't try to
be, this is a rock album. In the tension between the sonics and her voice
on these tunes lies a breeding ground for the impossible to happen — and it
does, over and again: Baez uses that tension, the notion that desire and
transcendence are two sides of the same coin, and rides it into the cracked
heart of each of these fine tunes, shattering their surfaces and their
artifice. She travels into the center, where each lyric holds its
vulnerability, its culpability, and she revels there, bringing back meaning
and truth from the murky, messy, wanton depths. Check out her reading of
Henry's "King's Highway"; it finds ghostly traces of the Band in its
ringing electric six strings and shuffling drums. Her version of Merchant's
"Motherland" blows the original away. Her voice tears at the grain of the
lyric, opening it enough for the listener to feel it in her marrow, its raw
need, its profound nakedness, and the fiery spirit at its heart. Spector's
production, which is reminiscent of Daniel Lanois', has more teeth; he
seems to like jagged edges, and Baez thrives on them here. The album ends
with her version of Earle's "Christmas in Washington." Somehow, this
reading of the song means more than Earle's; it's as if he wrote it for
her. As she invokes the ghosts of Woody Guthrie, Emma Goldman, and Malcolm
X, she places the entire weight of those generations — as instructed by
them — into her plea. It feels rightfully desperate, bewildered, and angry.
It is a prayer echoed with purpose, pride, and the disbelief that such a
plea would even be necessary in this day and age. Let's hope they hear it.
Dark Chords on a Big Guitar proves that as an artist, Baez is still
reaching, still restless, still resilient as leather, and possessed by the
spirit of loving kindness; she is still wily and sexy, and still seeking a
deeper, wider base to anchor her burning blue heart in the belly of her
muse. On this record, Baez is poetically, musically, spiritually, and
emotionally articulate; she voices with ease and conviction those scary,
forbidden things everyone else feels in the dark night of their own souls.
— Thom Jurek
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