Kelly Hogan, with I Like To Keep Myself In Pain, has made an album that is equal to her talent. Not that she hasn’t put out some fine recordings before, but this one looks to be that mythical beast, the “breakthrough” album.
The Atlanta native recorded some top-notch but obscure recordings with her The Jody Grind and the Rock*A*Teens (both influential but hardly household names) in the ’90s, and put out a couple of good solo albums in the early 2000s. Since then she has been based in Chicago and mostly been singing backup, on record and stage, with a bunch of other fine musicians, most notably in Neko Case’s band, but also with folks such as Jakob Dylan, Andrew Bird and Mavis Staples.
For this album, her Anti- debut, she asked many of her musician friends if they would each write a song for her, and of course they did. The first to turn one in, fortunately, was Vic Chesnutt, who took his own life in early 2010. Others included M. Ward, the aforementioned Andrew Bird, Brett and Rennie Sparks (The Handsome Family), Robyn Hitchcock, Jon Langford, Jon Wesley Harding, Robbie Fulks and more. And she gathered around her a small but high-octane band that includes Booker T. Jones (organ) and James Gadson (drums), plus Gabriel Roth of the Dap Kings (bass) and her longtime collaborator Scott Ligon on guitars and just about everything else, with some help from Nora O’Connor on fiddle and harmony.
Hogan is best known as an R&B singer, and it’s definitely her forte, but she can croon and wail in lots of styles, and she gives many of them a good workout here, from country to rock to pop. The album opens with a country-soul number of the kind she specializes in, penned for her by Catherine Irwin (Freakwater). It nicely introduces the album, with Jones’s organ floating easily over Hogan’s vocals and the easy swinging beat set by Gadson and Roth. Then comes a song that by rights should be a George Jones-style country weeper with lyrics by Jack Pendarvis, “We Can’t Have Nice Things,” except that Andrew Bird wrote some amazing music for it — like his own music, it rides a fine line between rock, pop and jazz. The first couple of verses she delivers in a low-key croon, then Jones kicks off the chorus with a huge glissando on his Hammond B-3, and it takes flight.
The title track was written by Mr. Sardonic himself, Robyn Hitchcock, a swinging shuffle that features some fine country-western-style picking on a nylon-string guitar by Ligon. Langford’s “Haunted” positively rocks, with a big, anthemic, sing-along chorus. Harding’s “Sleeper Awake” takes a page right out of early-’60s Motown, while Fulks’s “Whenever You’re Out Of My Sight” is more late-’60s Motown. The mostly acoustic, gothic “Ways Of This World” is an eery reminder of the dark genius that was Vic Chesnutt. I’m not quite sure yet what to think about M. Ward’s “Daddy’s Little Girl,” a first-person look back at the life of Frank Sinatra, as he attempts to justify it to his daughter Nancy. A bit creepy. Just the opposite is Hogan’s own song, “Golden,” a generous tribute to her friend and colleague Neko Case.
It is so good to see Kelly Hogan back in the limelight again, fronting her own project. I Like To Keep Myself In Pain is a strong, mature work from a singer with something to say and a beautiful voice to say it with.
(Anti-, 2012)
