The thing to keep in mind about Linda Thompson’s Won’t Be Long Now is that for all its Familial bearings, with ex-husbands children and grandchildren abounding, it doesn’t have an ounce of sentimentality and to its US audience this may come across as gnomic aphorism. Some truths are left best unsaid would not be part of Linda Thompson’s vision of folk or even pop music.
Linda doesn’t really make bad albums (even One Clear Moment holds up nicely) so Won’t Be Long Now is less a return to form and more just a return and the songs she sings don’t build to a worldview, not even musically. Rather it has a feel of a closeness which widens to admit a world and a casualness in which love and loss are the casualities.
The album opener has the echoness of Fairport Convention “Love’s For Babies And Fools” though it is new and self-penned, and former husband Richard Thompson adds his guitar (a pity he doesn’t add his voice) as they take down romantic love with one fell swoop. It is a fine song and not even the most horrifying of them, an award belonging to the a capella “Blue Bleezin’ Blind Drunk”, the story of a battered wife and her way of coping as such. It’s followed by her son Teddy Thompson’s ultimate song, a lovely poppy number about age and encroaching death “It Won’t Be Long Now” -lovely banjo I might add. Teddy also wrote “Never The Bride”, a Miss Havisham of a song. I’ve seen Teddy on stage and liked him a lot but on record less so, though both of his songs here are good enough to make me want to revisit.
My obsession lies with her dear friend Anna McGarrigle’s son Rufus Wainwright, whose All Days Are Night: Songs For Lulu is a devastated mourning for his mother (I saw him perform it at Carnegie and until he brought out his sister and her son, had never seen a sadder show in my life). I mention this because Linda’s cover of Anna’s “Fast As My Feet”, with her three kids and Grandson joining in, works as an antidote to Rufus’ sorrow, as though despite all odds there is joy in life and in family that can remove the sting even from death through love and art. Perhaps the moral of this entire album.
It is getting late, it won’t be long now for any of us, but there is still time.