Suzzy, the youngest sister in the Roches but the middle voice in the harmony folk trio, sings with an undertow; even when wisecracking, even when flirting with guys, even when joking at her sisters, there is a tugging to her voice. She adds an emotional depth to everything she sings. It is like the force of gravity pushing you towards the earth, a burnishing human sound. Or as though we need to add something she’s implying. Peripheral singing, with something just out of reach.
And it couldn’t be put to a better or more important use than it is on her new album Fairytale And Myth, recorded with her daughter Lucy Wainwright Roche -an excellent singer herself, and pianist Rob Morsberger. 11 songs, 5 covers, 6 Suzzy originals. The sense you get of Suzzy leaving words unsaid is part of her gift, the timbre of her voice, the barely concealed feeling, is central to the album: it is all subtext, its meaning a grave and beautiful thing.
This is very clear on the second track, Rob’s “Everybody Wants To be Loved” , it is a retelling of a Greek myth, softened into a fairytale for a child, but with an axiom lifted for the chorus. But its point is neither fairytales nor myth, but labyrinths and mazes. It is a puzzlement, it brings comfort but that voice is so hurt and burnished, so downwards in its tug that it sounds like a mournful, needful, lost in time thing. Rob’s song doesn’t really comfort a child, it isn’t really a comforting thought is it? But Suzzy gives it something else: she sounds as though she is in the middle of a spiral going on forever.
“Everybody Wants To Be Loved” is quietly tense and Suzzy’s own opener, “Broken Stemmed Tenderness” is a modern Roches song: the “hold on tough guy” salutation has some of the flirty wittiness we have come to expect from a Roche; Suzzy seems to be wishing a man, and by extension us all, a hopefulness: “not so bad to fall down in the weeds”. The song is a fairytale, the same way the second track is a myth: it is about male strength and weakness (not unlike Marina And The Diamonds “I Am Not A Robot”), it is as if Suzzy and her daughter, whose voice slips just below her mothers and between the two, they echo and thread together a place to land safely.
The two songs are near perfection and not surprisingly, the rest of the album doesn’t quite sustain it. After the outward search of these two songs, the following two move songs inward and the fifth is a misjudged cover of Loudon Wainwright III’s “When I’m At Your House”. It isn’t bad, mind. The song is not untypical tough guy getting his fill, and conceptually, a break from the shadows is not a terrible idea, I guess. But Loudon could break any spell just by his huge presence, at Sinatra In The Park last month he just about derailed the evening with his forthrightness.
Part two is lovely but doesn’t peak as high. “Living In A Beautiful Day” feels like sleight of hand, the way the first half didn’t bother with, and while I came around eventually, just because it is such an undeniably beautiful version, “For No One” seemed a little overplayed as a choice for a cover. Still it seems as though Suzzy is treading water a little to reach Mark Johnson’s “When A Heart Breaks Down” –the devastating conclusion to the album with both Suzzy and Lucy giving the song the best vocal on the album.
This is a very good collection of songs about togetherness and loss. In an otherwise excellent review, Henry Carrigan wrote ”this album poignantly captures the ragged ways that we all move between fantasy and reality” and what I see as happening is something else: it sees no difference between fantasy and reality; Suzzy is claiming us as mythic creatures and love as a fairytale of intimacy; reality is just myth and fairytales in real time.
This seems especially true given the actual music on the album. Though it includes everything from viola to accordion, its central instrument is Rob Morsberger’s piano underneath the mother and daughters singing in close harmony, sometimes in sounds a precise evocation of albums meaning.
Suzzy and her daughter joined together with pianist Morsberger (the cult popular singer songwriter) after Suzzy, devastated by the news that Rob had terminal cancer, wanted to record with him one more time. Morsberger’s performance is a gorgeous tour de force that seems to be a reflection of the three musicians when they recorded the album. Carrigan quotes Suzzy discussing the recording sessions in fairy tale terms: of extreme cold as they recorded in full coats and extreme warmth between the family and the friend; it’s like “The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe” -it seems like a spell being woven to make alive for ever something passing rapidly never to return . Life is always finite but the knowledge of a definitive stop date on a persons life gives it a mythic quality that usually takes time to acquire: its impermanence makes it magical. And when that person is recording songs that are almost an emotional commentary on getting lost in a labyrinth of life and finding a way out, the result is… well, is this album. The myth is the recording, the fairytale the album itself.
Fairytale And Myth starts near the end, it goes round and round and then circles back to the beginning. It would be heartbreaking except the subtext isn’t that Rob was dying and indeed died on June 2nd, 2013, but that life is a myth and fairytales don’t always end the way you want them and we are all lost in a maze working are way out but tenderness is infinite and everybody is loved.
Grade: A