Cool for cats
Comprehensive career survey of the pioneering folk artist’s hardto-find work.
Norma Tanega ★★★★ I’m The Sky: Studio And Demo Recordings, 1964-1971 ANTHOLOGY RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP
NORMA TANEGA lived three lives. It’s how she saw herself and how her friends discuss her in Try To Tell A Fish About Water, a “biography of reflections” released by Anthology Recordings to accompany this new collection. The music, taken from official studio albums, abandoned projects and home demos, covers her first life, which began when the classical scholar born to Filipino and Panamanian parents in Long Beach, California, moved to New York in 1963 and immersed herself in the Greenwich Village folk scene. The Tanega that emerges in Try To Tell… is determined and uncompromising but also sensitive and enlightening. That’s also the image given by the songs collected here.
The first disc brings together Tanega’s studio recordings, taken from her 1966 debut Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog, her impossible-to-find 1971 follow-up for RCA I Don’t Think It Will
Hurt If You Smile, and a brace of previously unreleased tracks from an abandoned 1969 LP, Snow
Cycles. For an artist whose recorded work is so elusive, it’s simultaneously thrilling and frustrating to hear this assembled overview. The opening tracks, 1966’s Jubilation and 1971’s Now Is The Time, are both declamatory numbers, the first about a freeing communal union of “One, two, three/You and I and us”, the second a near-cousin of The Youngbloods’ 1966 peace-and-love anthem, Get Together. Both are simultaneously strong willed and naive, and neither display Tanega at her best. Similarly, of the two versions of 1971’s What More In This World Could Anyone Be Living For, the compilers choose the anthemic, choir-backed arrangement over the vulnerable, introspective version. Yet it’s here where Tanega’s genius lies, in a lightness of touch and a sensitivity to detail, as displayed in her 1966 hit, Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog, but also 1971’s circulatory, poetic love song Elephants, Angels And Roses and 1966’s corrosively dark protest number You’re Dead.
It’s frustrating that only two songs from the abandoned Snow Cycles are present: a basic guitar instrumental entitled No One (Instrumental), and the exquisite When It Touches You, A Snowflake Dies. Written in the wake of her romance with Dusty Springfield, it’s a love song where cryptic lyrical intensity is married to an arrangement of simple yet intricate beauty.
I’m The Sky’s second disc is more satisfying. Assembled from demos discovered in Tanega’s Claremont home after her death in 2019, these voice and six-string guitar numbers are, for the most part, soft-whispered, personal, questing and philosophical. They are the sound of someone with no further need to be the version of herself she once was; now free-floating, drifting, at ease.
In 1972, Tanega returned to California and became a painter and part of the Claremont LGBTQ community; her second life, before her third and final as a teacher. However, she kept recording music with such experimental folk outfits as Brian Ransom’s Ceramic Ensemble. It would be great to hear those recordings next. But before that, could we have proper releases of Snow Cycles and I Don’t Think It Will Hurt
If You Smile please? This music is too good to only exist as fragments.