REALITY COUNTRY
Singer-songwriters spin tales of love, death and Percocet
Pistol Annies — a.k.a. Nashville rebels Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley — are a singing-songwriting buddy movie, reimagining the Rio Bravo gang as 21st-century good ol’ gals, poppin’ Percocets, rolling fatties and cruising for cowboys, with their middle fingers up to their 10-cent towns and two-bit marriages. The trio’s third album, Interstate Gospel, might as well be titled Hell Hath No Fury. It’s a showcase of women exercising prerogatives: reclaiming their identities post-marriage (the hilarious “Got My Name Changed Back”) and bragging on their trophy boyfriends (“Sugar Daddy”). What’s most exciting is seeing three of country’s greatest writers inspiring one another to some of their best-ever work. Take “Milkman,” a tender ballad about daughters wishing different lives for their moms, and “Cheyenne,” about a girl with a chip on her shoulder whose “daddy said she was destined for sadness.”
Rosanne Cash convenes her own power trio on “8 Gods of Harlem,” a standout from She Remembers Everything that enlists Kris Kristofferson and Elvis Costello to pen and sing verses in a narrative involving a young man’s death. “We pray to the god/Of collateral children,” sings Cash, haunt- ed by headlines of failed gun-safety legislation and senseless human loss. She’s a literary writer (see the story collection Bodies of Water and her memoir, Composed), and she goes deep on this set, sometimes conjuring autobiography (“Everyone But Me,” involving the loss of a mother and father), sometimes from a third-person remove (the title track, resonant in light of #METOO and the Kavanaugh hearings). Every human has daddy issues; Cash’s are particular to life in a countrymusic dynasty. But they don’t define her art, however much they inform it. She’s a writer at the top of her game.
So is Doug Paisley, a Canadian singer-songwriter with a John Prine feel for wordplay and storytelling details. Starter Home is a set of beautifully turned, low-key meditations in part on being a fuck-up — such as “Mister Wrong” (its opening couplet: “Got up out of bed, fell down on my head/ Heard the words you said as I hit the floor”) and “Drinking With a Friend,” which ponders “the price we pay for alcohol.” The album is mostly acoustic, with exquisite musicianship, “Dreamin’ ” in particular — it unspools like a late-Grateful Dead ballad, with beautiful harmonies and a dusting of electric guitar, a reminder of how big a tent country music really can be, when you get right down to it.