DAVE'S DIARY - 28 MARCH 2005 - LEE ANN WOMACK CD REVIEW
LEE ANN WOMACK - 2005 CD REVIEW
PSALMS AND SINNERS - WOMACK WOWS WOES
"Had it all, just too young to know/ but that was 20 years and two husbands ago." - Twenty Years And Two Husbands Ago. - Lee Ann Womack-Dale Dodson-Dean Dillon.
 Lee Ann Womack |
Texan
troubadour Lee Ann Womack charmed with stone country on her 1997
debut disc before making a detour into chart candy. But it doesn't stop there - former singing spouse Jason Sellers joins her on harmony on three songs including One's A Couple and Odie Blackman penned hit I May Hate Myself In The Morning. |
Both songs
mix drinking and guilt of cheating - her hit tells of a couple who wind
up back in each other's arms after imbibing.
That video features their daughter Aubrey, fellow Texan rocking country
singer Jack Ingram, manager Erv Woolsey but not Sellers or current husband
Frank Liddell.
Or even dad Aubry - a disc jockey in hometown Jacksonville on KEBE and
KOOI.
One's A Couple finds the singer's character on the dance floor
yearning for the man she split with two years earlier.
"They institutionalize people acting like I do/ drinkin' with somebody
that ain't in the room."
TWENTY YEARS AND TWO HUSBANDS AGO
Womack didn't
pen those songs but co-wrote Twenty Years And Two Husbands Ago
with One's A Couple tunesmith Dale Dotson and prolific honky tonker
Dean Dillon.
"I was in my office with my assistant, Courtney, and she asked about
a photograph she had found," Womack, now 38 and mother of two, revealed.
"She asked me where it was taken or something. I said, "Oh,
Lord, I don't remember. That was 20 years and two husbands ago."
By the time it came out of my mouth, I thought "Oh, my Lord, my life
is such a country song!" I immediately called Dale and he and Dean
and I got together and wrote that song."
Womack, whose discs include stone country by fellow Texan Bruce Robison,
Buddy and Julie Miller, hired Jo Dee Messina session serf Byron Gallimore
as producer.
"I had told Byron I'm from Texas, and I wanted to sound like it,"
said Womack who learned the music side of her craft a decade before expatriate
Australian Jedd Hughes at South Plains College in Levelland.
The singer has a delicious dexterity in covering all shades of love -
the regret of The Last Time, flippancy in Kostas tune Happiness,
timeless state metaphor in When You Get To Me and use of dirty
dishes to come clean on yes, cheating, in Painless.
Womack energises working late cheating clues in He Ought To Know That
By Now.
Sellers returns on harmonies on historic Sonny Throckmorton tune Waiting
For The Sun To Shine - an eighties album title track for Ricky Skaggs
- that punctuates Annie Roboff-Marcus Hummon tune What I Miss About
Heaven and Stubborn (Psalm 151.)
Womack delivers heavy-duty homilies with vocal vibrance that ensures none
of the collateral corn of derivative divas.
2002 CD REVIEW
LEE ANN WOMACK LEAVES IMAGE BEHIND
"I need
something like morphine only better/ I need something like a kiss that
lasts forever/ I need something and I need more/ I need something like
money that will not burn." - I Need You - Julie Miller .
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When
Texan temptress Lee Ann Womack burst on the scene with her stone
country weepers she was heralded in the same breath as Sara Evans. "There's no other country singer on the radio today I'd rather hear sing my songs," says Julie who joined her singing spouse Buddy and Womack on the CMA Awards to perform her tune Does My Ring Burn Your Finger. |
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"She
makes everybody else sound like they're just fooling around."
Womack grew up in Jacksonville, Texas, listening to her dad spin country
discs on radio station KEBE and followed her dream to Nashville in 1986.
JASON SELLERS
She wed fellow
Texan troubadour Jason Sellers in 1990 and divorced him in 1997 - the
year of her debut hit Never Again, Again on Decca.
But Decca folded and Womack fell pregnant to producer and second spouse
Frank Liddell who desked Chris Knight's debut disc.
Now, after selling 3 million copies of third album I Hope You Dance,
she can afford to take chances.
Womack recorded riveting versions of Miller's I Need You and Irish
folk flavoured Orphan Train.
"When I heard her sing Orphan Train it was like wow she made
me think I wrote a really great song" says Miller.
"I feel that she heard somewhat of my own heart in this song. And
there aren't that many people who would."
But it's the Brett Beaver-Tom Douglas penned title track, replete with
its videogenic imagery of Mona Lisa, Mozart, Amadeus, Warhol, Da Vinci,
Monroe and Presley, that has lit up radio and charts.
So much so that a superfluous Matt Serletic pop version is the album finale.
GRETCHEN PETERS
Better value
are Womack's cut of Gretchen Peters inspirational I Saw Your Light
and her assertive delivery of Berg-Angelo triangle song You Should've
Lied.
She also does a credible cut of Robison's self-deprecatory Blame It
On Me and teary Red Lane-Hank Cochran-Dale Dodson weeper He'll
Be Back.
When You Gonna Run To Me and Talk To Me are soulful radio
friendly country pop but don't have idyllic imagery of acoustic Forever
Everyday or ruptured romance of Dave Loggins-John Bettis tune Closing
This Memory Down.
She covers all musical bases in this disc, helping kick start the sales
recovery of the genre.
Ironically, Womack does it with strings but will be swamped by The Dixie
Chicks' whose reversal to roots is a bigger barn-burner.
The Chicks music, spawned in the O Brother Where Art Thou era,
has one distinct advantage - it's surfing the U.S. airwaves and selling
here with none.
So who is Womack's inspiration?
"I love Buddy Miller because I like the approach he takes,"
Womack says of a man returning here for a solo tour in October.
"He makes his records in his living room, and they are spectacular.
It's awesome to know there are labels spending the money they do cutting
records that just don't do anything for you. Then you take Buddy's record
that he made in his kitchen and it just makes me want to get up on top
of a table and dance."