“It’s never over, my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder
It’s never over, all my riches for her smiles when I slept so soft against her”
That’s off Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” and since Dixie Chicker chose not to cover Elliott Smith, this is about as you are gonna get to a statement of intent: Buckley is a poster child for alt-rock and Natalie Maines is a mixed up mumbled country chick who cause a stir and a stink back in the early 00s when she called out Dubya for invading Iraq.
In 2013, Natalie released her first solo album Mother with covers of songs by Eddie Vedder, Ben Harper, Patty Griffin, and, er, Roger Waters, the concept was a few of her favorite things though only “Mother” (not Lennon’s of course) a well known cover.
So especially for me (I never liked Dixie Chicks) this should be a disaster but it is far from it. With the country concept still somewhere int he background of blues workouts like “Trained”, she throws herself into the world of rock and song by song she sings them just right. The first five songs are sublime, opening with a fuzzed out rock guitar lick, and Natalie’s singing immediately somewhere else from her light Dixie Chicks mode, followed by a “Mother” which should, really, come on, totally suck, given a lovely deep reading, all of Pink Floyd’s snark dissipated in a sort of empathetic troubling emotional sinking feeling. The disputable but not by much best song on the album is Buckley’s astounding “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”, a with a close connection to “New Wave”, the sort of stuff Chrissie Hynde sang in 1980; it’s a type of “Talk Of The Town”.
What missteps there are are really minor, and tend to be songs had a hand in hand. We barely need one Ben Harper song and the second “Vein In Vein” co-written with Maines is the first whatever on the album. But if Harper drags me as a songwriter, he does excellent production work on Mother. The songs are crystalline and the guitar playing is clean even if you think it would be better muddied it you’d be wrong.
The complaint is the songs don’t link thematic in your mind, it is more like a random collection of tracks, a playlist, but both the sound is the linking and Natalies voices sounds unique throughout. A terrific album.