The moment Patty Loveless’s long-shot “When Fallen Angels Fly” was announced as the winner of the Country Music Association’s Album of the Year last fall, Loveless turned in her seat in the Grand Ole Opry House audience and looked confusedly at her business manager, Chuck Flood.
“I said, `Chuck, did I hear that right?’ ” remembers Loveless.
“I was thinking maybe I was just imagining they had called off my name, and I’m looking at Chuck like, `Should I go up there?’ I looked around trying to see if somebody else was walking up. I’d hate to look like a fool–you know, have Alan Jackson be walking up there to receive the award and here I am walking beside him.”
But the award wasn’t Jackson’s, nor that of any of the other three males who had been nominated for it. For only the second time in the CMA awards’ 29-year history, it went to a woman, this time one who over her decade-long career has come to stand well apart from even female peers.
Like her albums, Loveless is a curious mix of the hardest kind of country, the hottest kind of contemporary, and a lot of raw passion mixed with significant doses of lyrical wit. Her voice is one of the most powerful in the field, the sound of hillbilly steel tempered and sharpened in the forges of honkytonk rock ‘n’ roll.
The in-your-face vocals belie a quiet, gentle and not terribly secure personality. And the lonely pain in her ballads seems to flow out of dark hollows of not only her native eastern Kentucky but of her own divorced and once-troubled past.
The force of these ballads is illustrated by the fact that Pam Tillis says she initially was pitched a landmark Loveless hit, “How Can I Help You Say Goodbye,” and rejected it because, although its artistry made her weep, she feared its “heavy” sentiment would put listeners off.
Told that, Loveless appears a little surprised.
“That’s what I want,” she says in her soft, deliberate way. “I want it to get right down into people’s guts and make ’em feel it.
“That’s what I started singing for. I learned to sing from records I was listening to by Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton and the men–Merle Haggard, George Jones–and the kind of material they chose, I would like what it did to me, whether it was crying or being happy.
“That’s what I wanted to do. I thought, `I want to sing. I want to do that to people.’ “
At 39, she has been doing it to them for 10 years now.
After lots of memorable hits–from the early “Timber,” “That Kind Of Girl” and “On Down the Line” to such recent ones as the emotional 1995 Song of the Year nominee “How Can I Help You Say Goodbye,” the wacky most-performed Broadcast Music Inc. song of 1994, “Blame It on Your Heart,” and the brand new and somewhat daring single “A Thousand Times a Day”–the shy Kentucky coal miner’s daughter appears to have warmed up country fans to not just her songs but herself.
Touring regularly with superstar Vince Gill as well as selling out shows of her own, she says she has learned to not be so private onstage.
“When I’m having a bad day or something’s happening in my life, sometimes I’ll get into a song that just nails me,” she says. “And I had to learn to leave myself open, that it’s OK if a tear comes to my eye or if I break (vocally) in the middle of a song.”
Loveless is scheduled to perform June 29 at the Country Music Festival in Grant Park.
In 1996 she’s back with a new album, “The Trouble With the Truth,” that is as distinctive as “When Fallen Angels Fly.” Characteristically, it opens with the rhythmic barnburner “Tear Stained Letter,” then runs up dead against its brooding title song, which sports a quintessentially Loveless opening line:
“The trouble with the truth is, it’s always the same old thing.”
There’s the hot, surrealistic uptempo “She Drew a Broken Heart,” whose heroine draws a broken heart on a satin sheet using a tube of Revlon Rose lipstick; there’s a song of first-date intimacy titled “Lonely Too Long”; the female strength anthem and No. 1 first single “You Can Feel Bad (If It Makes You Feel Better)”; the sublime love song “Lucky To Feel That Way At All”; and “A Thousand Times a Day,” in which Loveless sings a daring line about how she “used to drink ’til I dropped.”
Loveless says she’s no feminist, but there’s no question that she broke ground with this line that, delivered by a male, would have passed all but unnoticed. To sing it was also brave personally, calling up old alcohol “demons I’ve had to deal with in my past” which in the past two or three years have become, thanks to the tabloids, “no secret” to the public.
“The way I was brought up, a woman is taught that men have bad habits–that it’s OK, it’s the way men are–but women don’t have bad habits,” she says.
Loveless’ own problems now aren’t nearly so extensive as they used to be. She says “Lucky To Feel That Way At All” describes her relationship with her Nashville producer/husband Emory Gordy, with whom she recently celebrated her seventh anniversary. She confides that they have begun planning to have a baby, “if God will permit and things go well.”
Her career, after maintaining a steady pace for several years, may finally have broken through to a higher level. The 1995 Album of the Year triumph would appear to give her some momentum for the Female Vocalist competition in 1996.
In that regard, her “Trouble With the Truth” album closes with a stirring and chilling sort of secular spiritual that may prove prophetic as the prayer. It talks about the trials of this life and a victory to come, if only in one’s place in the funeral procession.
“Someday,” its title goes, “I Will Lead the Parade.”
