Allison Moorer - Mockingbird
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I think these two poles: lyricism and drama, virtuosity and craft offer a context and a continuum for approaching the cover album. While I've only encountered the work of Cat Power in fleeting glances, and while with the occasional song she steps aside enough to let some other thing come forth and so enraptures me, for the most part the songs on Jukebox struck me as theatrical, as if with each song she were taking on a new role which quickly put me off, quite literally by keeping me at a distance, when I like my music close, intimate and immediate.
Paradoxically, sometimes at least, it is in the act of holding back rather than holding forth that an artist allows / enables her audience to come close. Receptivity invites me in; while self-presentation, the artist coming out to meet me and usher me in causes an instinctive step back. Listening to Allison Moorer's new cd the experience seems to be all about absorption: Moorer absorbing the work of other songwriters and absorbing the listener in the life of each song, so that what you get is not Allison Moorer or Patti Smith or Nina Simone or Joni Mitchell or June Carter Cash or Gillian Welch, but the pure, unadulturated song.
I think this is the point Moorer is making in the album's title song, the only song she wrote and the opener of the album: the mockingbird sings the songs of other birds, but still that borrowed music is no less the mockingbird's song. If the nightingale is an emblem of the virtuosic, the mockingbird is an apt emblem for the artisanly.
Probably it is a sign of some grave moral failing in me that I have yet to come to an appreciation of, let alone a reverence for, Patti Smith, which makes me all the more grateful to Allison Moorer for giving me this amazing Smith song in a form I can delight in.
And for good measure a cover by Simple Minds...
Comments (6)
-Patti Smith
she is benediction she is addicted to thee she is the root connection she is connecting with he here I go and I don't know why I fell so ceaselessly could it be he's taking over me... I'm dancing barefoot heading for a spin some strange music draws me in makes me come on like some heroin/e she is sublimation she is the essence of thee she is concentrating on he, who is chosen by she here I go and I don't know why I spin so ceaselessly, could it be he's taking over me... [chorus] she is re-creation she, intoxicated by thee she has the slow sensation that he is levitating with she ... here I go and I don't know why, I spin so ceaselessly, 'til I lose my sense of gravity... [chorus] (oh god I fell for you ...) the plot of our life sweats in the dark like a face the mystery of childbirth, of childhood itself grave visitations what is it that calls to us? why must we pray screaming? why must not death be redefined? we shut our eyes we stretch out our arms and whirl on a pane of glass an afixiation a fix on anything the line of life the limb of a tree the hands of he and the promise that s/he is blessed among women. (oh god I fell for you ...)