• Rating:
If you have soles of wind, it turns out you travel. If it turns out you travel, you never feel at home. If you have the blues in your voice, it turns out you sing. If it turns out you sing, you do it effortlessly.
We are talking, clearly, about poison and antidote, that is, restlessness and poetry, things that usually go hand in hand.
We are talking about Karen Dalton.
And Karen Dalton was, above all, an idealist. The blues should not be wasted, it must not be ravaged. It must gush, flow, without being caged or formalized, or it loses its magic.
Records are nothing but pieces of plastic containing the voice of a ghost. And tours, let's not even mention them, are for playing for friends or where you feel at home. Even though, as we've said, Karen never felt at home.
Sure, to us such a way of thinking may seem absurd, or too romantic. But Karen Dalton was an ancient soul and was, besides being wildly free, completely without filters and without skin.
Her relationship with music was pure instinct, without any sense of duty, without homework. Call it talent, if you like. Call it vocation. But having talent, having vocation, does not mean having a beautiful voice. It means being a voice.
Not only that, Karen Dalton, like all supernatural artists, was extraordinary especially if left to herself, that is, just voice and guitar, or voice and banjo. It doesn't matter if she doesn't sound like Billie Holiday, if there are no jazzy colorations or soul R&B fuel.
Listening to posthumous records (ancient live performances, old home recordings) not only do you understand very well her reluctance to enter the studio, but it spontaneously makes you agree with her.
Even though, to be clear, we, we who are not ancient souls, will never thank enough those who convinced her, even resorting to deception, to record her only two official albums. After all, we couldn't help it, they are timeless masterpieces.
But now it's time to talk about her voice....
Mysterious, elusive, absorbed in something that doesn't concern us. A distant dew of melancholy that barely settles on the small flower of listening.
Familiar, ardent, hypnotic, intent on taking possession of our hearts. A sticky and amber honey that is both the premise and consequence of that flower.
A voice that lives in a lacerating dichotomy of closeness and distance, presence and absence, subtle penetration and definitive autism. That's why it always seems on the verge of breaking, shattering.
Even if it never loses its measure, or has a measure all its own: an intermittent breath made of imperceptible clamor, sharp bird trills that penetrate under the skin, twigs crackling under an ember already extinguished.
All in an otherworldly atmosphere where simple songs from the ABCs of the soul (that is, folk and blues), turn, through a sort of jazz enigma (that is, the distance) towards something unheard of. At least as far as the first record is concerned.
Because the second record is another matter.
Here the sound, enriched with soul sweetness, R&B robustness, and certain typical 70s singer-songwriter atmospheres, becomes thicker and warmer.
The voice, rougher and more ferrous, spiritually and phantasmically grazes an emotional territory almost in the style of Janis Joplin. Although the measure, well, the measure is always the same.
Not only that, it's a record that wanted to be commercial. And, in fact,
it contains some tracks that, even if not blatantly radio-friendly, could even have been hits. Only then, well, it didn't exactly go that way.
In any case, commercial or not, it's a beautiful record and contains her three most beautiful songs: “Something in our mind”, “Katie cruel”, and “Same old man.”
“Something in our mind”: a sweet and spontaneous letting go of the sound with only the singing to tear, Loaded with soul, the reins relaxed yet loose, the voice burned and parched. And in addition, a tortured violin as a complement.
“Katie cruel” and “Same old man,” that is, tradition that becomes trance by drinking from sacred sources with the soul split in two. And a voice that, describing it, I won’t even try, let's just say it's the most right one to sing something like: “If I were where I would like, then certainly I would not want to be where I am.”
For the five (if not six) stars, these three jewels would suffice, but the rest also deserves, deserves absolutely. It doesn't matter if the dress sewn on her sometimes doesn't seem the most suitable for her.
However, one cannot fail to mention the suspended elegy of “Are you leaving for the country,” the last track of the album, a true fade-out farewell.
It speaks of a return to the land, to that little house without electricity or running water where she had lived until not long ago. Oh Karen, you should have done it. I imagine the horseback rides, the banjo played on the porch, and you beautiful again as in the photos of youth.
Instead, they sent you to Europe, on tour with Carlos Santana. You fled after a few dates. Then the usual story: no more music, dependence, decay, and so on and so forth...
You died in the early nineties, forgotten by everyone.
If you have soles of wind, it turns out you travel. If it turns out you travel, you never feel at home. If you have the blues in your voice, it turns out you sing. If it turns out you sing, you do it effortlessly.
But when you no longer sing, those soles turn to stone...
A lover’s kiss...
Loading comments slowly
