The 'Elephant Dancing' columns, Interview magazine 2006-2008: Kelly Willis

July 2007

There’s nothing on Kelly Willis’s new Translated From Love—a wonderful album titled after its soppiest song—to come close to Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” but there isn’t anything else around that does, either. Growing in presence by the month, “Rehab” should be the record of the year.

It opens like a hurricane—with what a friend of mine, talking about the first notes of “Satisfaction,” once called “that takeover sound.” There’s Winehouse’s thin, Macy Gray–like voice, but with a grit that seems to draw from the deep well of early-70s Southern soul music: the pain and defiance you could find in productions from Texas or New Orleans, but not Philadelphia or New York City. There’s the outrageous use of church bells, as if every cathedral in London is celebrating the way the singer promises “I don’t never want to drink again”—the way, that is, you can hear how many drinks she had before she said it.

It’s a great single on an album that can’t sustain itself. Except for the title song—an uncensored, unflinching suicide note of a tune that somehow calls up both the devastating 1959 British passing-for-white movie Sapphire and Carolyn Sullivan’s weird 1966 single “Dead!”—Winehouse’s Back to Black (Universal Republic) uses itself up in an apparent pursuit of a saleable style, a persona that can boil off the grime that’s still floating on the surface of her music, or sticking to the bottom of the pot.

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You can hear the same thing—the search for a marketing strategy—in Feist’s recent The Reminder (Cherrytree/Interscope) or Macy Gray’s Big (Geffen). On The Reminder the arrangements are so shiny and clever it’s as if the record was made less to be listened to than admired. On Big you can feel Gray growing smaller by the song, her grating, under-your-skin voice all smoothed over, all dressed up.

What makes Kelly Willis—the Austin, Texas, country singer who records for the rather highbrow independent Rykodisc—stand out from the crowd, the crowd not just of ambitious singers from Winehouse to Gray, but of far less interesting solo performers as John Mayer, John Legend, or Lucinda Williams, is that she seems completely comfortable in her own skin. It’s there in the way her drawl opens up in so many different directions: in one moment as a way of communicating that there’s no need to rush the story, in another moment as a whip to crack, as an insistence that the story has to be told right now or the nerve you need to tell it will be gone.

In the odd “Teddy Boys”—a man sees a gang of thugs passing by, but you can’t tell if he wants to join them or if he wants them to beat him up—Willis winds the word jail around two lines, tying them up in a knot of pure pleasure. In “Nobody Wants to Go to the Moon Anymore,” everything is moving fast, as if the moon is receding as Willis sings. She seems to be talking about the space program until the third verse; then the story at once comes down to earth and goes higher than before. “Your mother vacationed there on her senior trip,” Willis sings, as if to push the words past you before they can register. “You were just a sprout in time, a smile on her lips/And she blew all her money on that very first day/On a fist full of trinkets your grandma threw away.” Willis snaps off the last word of each stanza, fed up, refusing to believe the world is as small as it seems.

She runs barefoot through the grunge of Iggy Pop’s “Success,” stretching it out, sounding drunker (or more lost in the sleaze of some karaoke bar she’ll never remember anything about) with every chorus, the band behind her finally reaching that place where all bar bands reach sooner or later: the place where every song turns into “96 Tears.” “The More That I’m Around You” has the explosive lift, the building joy of Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom.”

The heart of the album—of this woman asking for 40 minutes of your time to tell you her theory of life—is in “Don’t Know Why.” Here again, it’s the drawl that opens the door of the song, that casts doubt on every “Yes,” that refuses the finality of any “No.” It’s a woman singing about a man—and again, you can’t quite tell. Are they still together? Or have they been apart for years? As the song ends, the singer sees the man in front of her: “One step from the crowd,” as if he’s about to vanish into it.

Willis trusts the listener to find his or her way into the stories’s she’s telling. Except in moments, most of the people in the air today seem terrified of the very idea.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, July 2007