These days most Nashville singers try to get a few songs of emotional or intellectual strength onto their albums, to balance the requisite lighter tunes chosen for their radio-friendliness.
Not Patty Loveless. Her struggle is the reverse: to find a few lighter songs with which to leaven her albums’ thick lyrical dough.
For her new album, “Long Stretch of Lonesome,” Loveless says: “I was still looking for a song sort of like `Blame It on Your Heart’ or `I Try To Think About Elvis’ (two of her zanier and lighter hits of the past). I wanted to cut one more because I felt like this was a very serious album. I wouldn’t say `dark’; it’s just that lyrically it’s very serious, even the uptempo songs.”
With all the college degrees and diversely urban hipness having infiltrated country music over the past several years (degrees ranging from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Ivy League resume to Deana Carter’s University of Tennessee bachelor’s degree to Trisha Yearwood’s Belmont College sheepskin; hipness from Pam Tillis’ brainy humor to Wynonna’s blow-you-away big-mama blues), the most consistently serious female artist in Nashville may well be the shy and slow-spoken 40-year-old high school graduate from the dark hollows of Eastern Kentucky.
Her music is different from the rest of the pack. In it there is a preoccupation with the uncomfortable questions deep inside a soul.
“I guess that I continue to carry on the influences that I’ve had over the years of my life,” she responds. “My dad and my mom, they listened to a variety of mountain music and bluegrass music, and I was listening to the Stanley Brothers and Molly O’Day and Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.
“Listening to this form of music as a child, I used to think it was so sad. I think a lot of the reason I sound the way I do is that I carry into the music I do today those influences of my early years. Listening to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights with my mother. Sometimes on Sundays I remember if Mama wasn’t able to get to church we’d hear sermons of, like, old Regular Baptists coming through the local radio.
The crucial elements in Loveless music are its identification with sadnesses.
Loveless has endured much of that herself, especially in the past few years, with the deaths of her father and an older sister, as well as her husband’s debilitating bouts with pancreatitis.
The song that closes her new album is “Where I’m Bound,” a song about death and peace co-written by Loveless’ guitar player and a friend who, just before completing the lyric, went to the funeral of someone very close to him, the singer says.
Loveless contends that “Where I’m Bound” is “more than a song of death.”
“It’s about freedom,” she says. “A lot of people have been struggling with illness or something else in their life, and finally, you know, they’re set free.”
There’s a throbbingly brooding track titled “I Don’t Want To Feel That Way (no more),” in which the singer appears to be psyching herself up, making a conscious effort to go on, and Loveless recalls that to sing it she had to “try to pretend I was having a conversation within myself.”
“I have been in this situation many, many times, especially in the past couple of years,” she says. “I cried myself to sleep and was getting so close to the state of depression that I had to kind of shake myself and go, `Stop it. You’ve got to get up, and you can’t get down. You’ve got to keep going. There are too many people that are depending on you.’ “
There may be more than she realizes. It would be one thing if Loveless were a niche artist for making records for the handful of so-called Americana stations, college-campus and public radio outlets. But she’s not. She successfully makes her music for mainstream country radio.
The question is, How?
“I guess I’ve just been real fortunate,” she says. “You want to make music that radio will still continue to play, but you have to think about making music for the album that people out there will go and buy.”
