Poet, artist, spoken-word performer, creative writer, musician and singer, Exene Cervenka is a well-rounded performer and artist. Her first gig, of course, was with the L.A. punk band X, which started in the 1970s and remains active today, doing nearly annual reunion tours. She first sang country music in X side project The Knitters — which also still gets together for an occasional reunion tour, most recently in winter ’08-09. So her first solo country album is not such a stretch. She’s been involved in roots music all along.
This is not your run-of-the-mill country album, of course. It’s more properly folk music with country influence, all held together by Exene’s two unique attributes–her voice and her creative turn with a lyrical hook. The album also is something of a personal triumph for Cervenka, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis earlier this year. Here’s what she had to say about it earlier this year on her Web site: “While this diagnosis will certainly mean some changes for me personally, it will not affect my commitments to the current X U.S. tour, not will it affect my solo album that is slated for release this fall on Bloodshot Records. My focus will certainly be on maintaining my health–many people remain strong and continue to live their lives as productively as they had before as MS diagnosis and I plan to be one of those people.”
That aside, this album is a lot of fun to listen to. For the most part, instrumentation is sparse: just Exene on acoustic guitar accompanying herself singing, with backing on vocals and fiddle (both violin and viola) from Amy Farris, backing vocals from Cindy Wasserman of Dead Rock West, guitars from her collaborator Jason Edge and some occasional keyboards from Dex Romweber.
Some of the songs, like the opener, “Trojan Horse” and “Why Is It So,” feature just Exene and an accompanying vocalist, simple folk affairs. But Farris plays a string trio on “Surface of the Sun” which wouldn’t be out of place on X’s most produced album, Ain’t Love Grand. “Walk Me Across the Night” draws on the full band, a galloping, piano-driven rocker. “Looking left, not looking right,” she sings, a line full of many different interpretations — “please take my hand and walk me across the night.”
These songs are full of clever lyrical turns like that. “Be still my beating batwings,” she drawls in “Where do We Go From Here,” on which Edge plays a nice baritone guitar solo. Likewise on the song that’s probably the album’s thematic centerpiece, “Sound of Coming Down.” Her voice has rarely sounded so vulnerable. “Glass half full of empty,” she sings at one point. “I am an illusion. Are you an illusion?”
“Go away, and stop leaving,” she sings at the opening of the most poignant song, “Honest Mistake.” Farris’s string trio forms a lovely accompaniment to this sadly hopeful song. By contrast, there’s the exuberant love song “Insane Thing,” with lines like “exotic freefall into a glass of wine / precarious pitstop in the land of nod.”
Exene wrote all of the 12 tracks on the disc except the traditional song that she calls “The Willow Tree,” which was recorded by (among others) the Carter Family as “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree.” Oh, she did the album’s cover art, too. As I said, she’s a well-rounded artist.
Exene is not breaking any new ground here, but in my book she doesn’t have to. These songs are deceptively simple, with lovely simple arrangements and lyrics that will keep taking you by surprise no matter how many times you listen.
(Bloodshot, 2009)
