In a hospital waiting room here six months ago, ex-Country Female Vocalist of the Year Kathy Mattea was enduring the lowest moment of her previously healthy life.
Her throat had developed a leaky blood vessel requiring delicate microsurgery, and problems appeared to be developing with it. Whether she ever would sing again hung in the balance, and she recalls being ”very scared”
sitting there awaiting crucial test results.
Then, she remembers, she looked around. She saw that the room was filled with ”stressed out” people facing life-threatening-rather than career-threatening-illnesses.
”It was like a revelation,” she says.
”I felt as if God had sat down beside me and turned on a light bulb. I realized it didn`t matter whether my voice came back or not; I was going to be all right. No matter whether I came out of it able to sing or not, I was so lucky.”
Mattea still can sing, as it turns out, and better than ever. Six weeks after her surgery, having undergone a rigorous program of vocal exercise and a lot of physical exercise for the rest of her body, she was back on the road performing songs from ”Lonesome Standard Time,” an exceptional, recently released album that easily is one of the year`s finest.
She is, however, a changed woman. Out of the ”meditating, praying, reading, thinking and soul-searching” associated with her vocal crisis came a decision to push herself into the forefront of the struggle against that foremost worldwide threat to life, AIDS.
”I`d been thinking hard about getting involved with it for a long time,” she says, ”but I never could hook up with the people I needed to. I kept offering to help with benefits and things, but it never happened. I don`t know if the people involved in AIDS advocacy work weren`t that aware of country music or what.
”Anyway, when I came out of the voice thing, I didn`t want to wait anymore. I didn`t want to put it on the back burner anymore. I told my manager, Bob Titley, to call AmFAR (the American Federation for AIDS Research) and these other (AIDS activist) organizations and tell them I wanted to be involved.”
In a historically macho, male-dominated music field in which AIDS had been mentioned only in whispers, Mattea in recent months has turned up the volume. She has headlined AIDS-walk shows, accepted leadership of an effort to make an AmFAR-affiliated ”Red, Hot and Country” album in behalf of AIDS research and won the cause a lot of publicity by wearing a red AIDS-awareness ribbon at the 1992 Country Music Association awards show.
In this first CMA awards show in several years in which her name was not among the Female Vocalist of the Year nominees, her AIDS stand probably won her more notice than winner Mary-Chapin Carpenter. Personal recognition, though, is definitely not the aim of her activism.
”The wonderful thing about doing this (AIDS benefit) work is that it`s not about me,” she says.
”It`s not about my eyeliner and where my record is in the charts and how big a star I am. It has raised the level of connection with people that I feel as a performer, and it takes some of the narcissism out of (stardom) for me.” A native of West Virginia and a graduate of West Virginia University, Mattea came onto the country scene a decade ago as an intelligent and sensitive young woman hailing from the intellectual, acoustic, bluegrass end of the country spectrum. She took a job as tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame and started learning the business from the ground up.
Finally reaching the CMA Female Vocalist of the Year plateau in 1989, she went on to win it again in 1990. Growing artistically during her reign, she made not only a hit but an instant classic of the moving eternal-love song,
”Where`ve You Been.”
Then, in a departure that appeared to renounce all interest in winning the vaunted CMA title a third consecutive time, she recorded ”Time Passes By,” a very folk-oriented album heavily influenced by Scottish music.
”That`s an interesting observation,” she says of the idea that she turned her back on the award. ”I think maybe unconsciously I was doing that. ”I had a lot of discomfort with a light that bright. It was very difficult for me to feel like I deserved it. Most of the time, while all that was going on, I felt this dread of being discovered as some phony-that one day they`d all wake up and go, `Her? She was the Female Vocalist of the Year? We didn`t mean to do that. We take it all back.`
”I`ve done a lot of work spiritually and emotionally to deal with the things all that brought up in me. I think I`m much more comfortable as an underdog than I am on top. But through the (throat) operation and the making of the last album and everything, I think I`m finally a little more at peace with other people`s judgment of me, good or bad.”
The recording of ”Time Passes By,” she says, was her response to an artistic ”test” as to whether she was going to ”serve art or
commercialism.” It turned out, however, to trigger a shock of self-recognition as well.
”At the end of that project I had a long talk with Bob, my manager,”
she recalls. ”He said, `Now you have to make a decision: Do you want to go off more on this tangent and do something different and be (pop-folk artist)
Suzanne Vega, or do you want to continue to be a country artist?`
”I thought about it and decided, `I don`t want to be Suzanne Vega. I want to be part of the country music community. I`ve grown up in it, I understand it, and it has accommodated me artistically with a wide range of stuff. It`s where I belong.` ”
That realization produced the epic excellence of ”Lonesome Standard Time,” an album on which dramatic neo-country sounds masterminded by producer Brent Maher, who supervised all the great records by the Judds, are combined with Mattea`s demanding taste in lyrical content.
”Lonesome Standard Time” boasts socially meaningful songs such as
”Standing Knee Deep in a River (Dying of Thirst),” about how in the rush of life humans tend to miss myriad opportunities to befriend and aid their fellows, and ”Seeds,” about how in humans as well as plants the
circumstances in which one begins life can have a lot to do with how far one gets in it.
There is also the rhythmic, gently humorous and deliciously biting
”Lonely at the Bottom,” in which an unprosperous working woman chides her luckier ex-friend for his complaints concerning the burdens of a top management position.
There is the striking title song, about the inescapable sensibilities of a country music fan. There is the chilling, Appalachian-sounding new ballad
”Last Night I Dreamed of Loving You.”
”I think it`s my most accessible album,” Mattea says. ”It`s absolutely my best singing ever, and I think there`s more energy on this record, and more energy with lyrical content.
”We`re doing a lot of it in our shows right now, and the response is amazing. I`ve never been able to put this much brand-new material in and have it accepted like this before.”
Soon after recording ”Lonesome Standard Time,” she underwent the throat surgery and then the regimen of voice exercises to render her able to reproduce once again onstage the impressive sounds she had made on the recording. As during her CMA title reign, the ”Time Passes By” recording and the recording of ”Lonesome Standard Time,” she continued to grow personally and artistically.
Where does this latest dramatic growth take her? Well, with any justice, to Grammy and CMA nominations for Album of the Year-and perhaps even another run at her old Female Vocalist of the Year title.
”I didn`t expect to be nominated (in `92),” she says. ”I hadn`t put out a record in a year and a half, and the last one I did put out before the nominations (`Time Passes By`) wasn`t exactly mainstream country. Probably my biggest shock about the nominations was that Lorrie Morgan wasn`t in the final five, either.
”Who knows what all the new faces in this business mean? Sometime in the last two years I went from being a newcomer to a veteran, and I don`t know when it happened. Those of us who aren`t exactly ancient but aren`t exactly new, either, who knows where our place is now?”
If hers turns out to be in the final five 1993 nominees for Female Vocalist of the Year, how will she react?
”I`d love to be back in there,” she says. ”And I hope to be.”
Welcome back. No, welcome home.
