Nashville is derided as “Nash Vegas” for a reason: Most of the country music recorded there today is overworked with glitz, prefabricated bigness and faux sincerity.
Today, though, two country gals are releasing a combination antidote to the likes of Martina McBride, Shania Twain, Jo Dee Messina and Faith Hill.
Each recorded in Nashville and escaped taint-free.
Of course, Loretta Lynn, the 70-year-old country lady legend, is no stranger to Nashville. And she says the guy who produced “Van Lear Rose,” the first album she’s ever completely written on her own, reminds her of the late Owen Bradley, the architect of the old Nashville sound. You’ll be surprised to learn whom she means.
Meanwhile, Mary Chapin Carpenter, who got her start playing the folk circuit here in Washington in the late ’80s and frequently recorded in Springfield’s Bias Studios, has never made an album in Nashville. She was always too independent-minded for it. Until now. “Between Here and Gone” is her first from Music Row.
Loretta Lynn
Van Lear Rose
Interscope Records
Bob Dylan had Daniel Lanois. Johnny Cash had Rick Rubin.
Loretta Lynn has Jack White.
Such pairings take an aging legend and jolt him — or her — with a shot of exuberant youth. The relationships are very different from, say, Babyface producing Eric Clapton. Exuberant youth doesn’t have to entail force-fitted modernity.
Mr. White, of the Detroit-based White Stripes, may play like a punk-rocking Jimmy Page, but the music supervisors of the movie “Cold Mountain” recognized that he’s equally as influenced by the greats of American folk music.
Miss Lynn is certainly one of those, which is why the Stripes dedicated their 2001 album “White Blood Cells” to her. They also invited her to join them during a concert last year in New York City.
On “Van Lear Rose,” Mr. White, who produced, arranged and performed on each track, crafts for Miss Lynn a sound much like that of the Stripes: raw, immediate and rooted.
The killer of the set, “Portland Oregon,” begins with the sounds of some psychedelic spaghetti Western and swells into a thrusty bottleneck riff. Then comes the sprightly pitch of Miss Lynn, duetting with Mr. White about a one-night stand made possible by pitchers of sloe-gin fizz.
The song is the most successful splicing of seemingly immiscible elements since … well, I don’t know what. Since Johnny Cash did Nine Inch Nails, I suppose. “Portland” is even better.
Miss Lynn and Mr. White aren’t grabbing for cash or easy hits. At least, that’s not the impression one gets from the shambolic blues-rock of “Have Mercy” and “Mrs. Leroy Brown,” on which Miss Lynn sings of draining a husband’s bank account to go carousing in a pink limousine.
“Van Lear Rose”— the title track is about the courting of Miss Lynn’s mother — is only intermittently rocking, though the rockers are what impress the most. But songs like the neo-hillbilly spiritual “High on a Mountain Top” and “Miss Being Mrs.,” which consists of nothing more than Miss Lynn’s voice and Mr. White’s acoustic guitar, don’t lag far behind.
While the album’s musical timbre may stem from the retro-minded Mr. White, “Van Lear Rose” is suffused with the life and times of Miss Lynn whether it’s the woman-scorned ballads (“Family Tree”) or the spoken-word ditties about a freak childhood illness (“Little Red Shoes”).
It ends with “Story of My Life,” which mentions some “big shot from Hollywood” who “thought a movie about my life would be good” and fades away with “me and Doo, married 48 years.”
That’s the “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” all right, an old Kentucky girl, backed by the muscle of the Motor City. Who woulda thunk it? Nobody in Nashville.
Which is why “Van Lear Rose” is so good.
Mary Chapin Carpenter
Between Here and Gone
Columbia Records
Mary Chapin Carpenter could use a Jack White-type jolt.
Not that the 46-year-old singer-songwriter is inspirationally dried up. It’s that she’s drawn so far inward that she can’t let her hair down anymore.
“I Feel Lucky,” “Shut Up and Kiss Me,” “Down at the Twist and Shout” — you won’t find any such trifles here, which is a continual Carpenter bummer of late.
“Between Here and Gone,” her eighth full-length, is, however, full of sharp lyrical observations about ordinary people doing ordinary things, such as being stuck in big-city traffic or feeling lonely and desperate.
Compassion is Miss Carpenter’s greatest strength, and on “Here and Gone” she yokes that strength to a post-September 11 contemplativeness.
She never dips overtly into politics here, but songs such as “Goodnight America,” “Grand Central Station” and “Elysium,” with their harried travelers and idealized paradises, create a vaguely-colored collage of suicide bombers and soccer moms.
Miss Carpenter has never needed the Nashville assembly line before. She scored hits without it and this album is no different. A possible target single, the up-tempo “Beautiful Racket,” is plunked with pedal-steel guitar fills that scream contemporary country radio.
The rest are poky ballads played on capoed acoustic guitars and sad pianos. They’d bog down in hands other than Miss Carpenter’s. Her alto is as resonant as ever, perfectly suited to her style of impressionistic storytelling.
The trip to Nashville didn’t affect her sound much; she could’ve made the same album in Springfield.
Either way, it’s as honest and heartfelt a record as Miss Carpenter has ever made.
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