Duos are common in country music, but trios are less so. These three chicas have all made varying marks on the folk and alt-country scenes, and have been getting together for a while to sing and play. Finally this year they were able to spend some time in the studio to record their act for posterity, and it’s a sweet document indeed.
Best known of the bunch is Caitlin Cary, who played fiddle and sang harmony to alt-country bad-boy Ryan Adams’ lead in Whiskeytown. Since that outfit fell apart at the seams, Cary’s made two critically acclaimed albums and one EP, mining the Americana side of the rich folk-rock vein opened three decades ago by the likes of Linda Thompson and Sandy Denny. Tonya Lamm and Lynn Blakey play in bands called Glory Fountain and Hazeldine, and they all write songs; some of the tracks on Sweetwater have been around for a while, and some were written just for this project.
Like an old LP might, this album has just 10 tracks, and thankfully there’s not a lot of filler. It starts off strong with the title track, written by Blakey, sung in a clear, aching country style over some rousing electric guitars and keyboards. Right off the bat they give you a full dose of their lovely three-part harmonies, and lots of Cary’s warm, throaty fiddle. I recognize Cary’s alto vocals, but I’m not sure which of the other ladies is singing the lead and which the high harmony, but that doesn’t reduce the pleasure.
Blakey also wrote the second track, “Heartbeat,” a song that epitomizes the kind of hard-won wisdom from love and loss that forms a substantial theme throughout the album. “I can’t hold you up, but I can’t put you down,” she sings in the heartbreaking chorus; “Some people fall in love, some of us stumble around.”
Remember the old country hit, “The Race is On,” in which the race horses’ names stand in for various emotions that assail the fool who falls in love? Cary’s first song on this album (written with a couple of her regular collaborators, Mike Daly and producer Chris Stamey), “Desire,” uses a similar motif: She’s calling-up her love interest, getting Desire on the line, but nothing in return from him. It’s a lovely waltz-time song that works best if you don’t try too hard to make the metaphor make sense.
“In a While,” co-written by Cary and Lamm, is the most powerful of the originals on the album. Cary takes the lead vocal on what may be a lullaby, or may portray a woman contemplating suicide. It’s a mournful tale, sketched in lean, spare, poetic strokes and quoting from the folk lullaby “All the Pretty Horses,” of a woman who finds all her dreams dying: “You bring the bar home in the smell of your hair/It wilts the flowers that girlhood put there…” Quite devastating, in the end.
I said there wasn’t much filler on the album, but Lamm’s “When You Sleep” and the trio’s “When Was the Last Time,” though lovely songs, are fairly uninspiring singer-songwriter fare. However, they’re more than balanced by two superb covers, the snappy, feisty Loretta Lynn song “Deep as Your Pocket,” and Lucinda Williams’ achingly beautiful “Am I Too Blue.” The three nail this one perfectly with their harmonies, and are backed superbly by the Chatham County Line bluegrass band — special kudos to mandolinist John Teer.
The group sends us off with another cover, a bluegrass-gospel rendition of George Jones’s “Take the Devil Out of Me.” Again, great harmonies on this one, but the arrangement is curiously flat.
Still, the hits are much more numerous than the misses; Tres Chicas don’t have the name recognition of the Dixie Chicks or that other country-girl Trio (Parton-Harris-Ronstadt), but when they find their groove, they’re just as convincing, perhaps moreso.
(Yep Roc, 2004)
