Music
Bettye LaVette
I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise(Anti- Records)
by Andy Beta
By the looks of the cover, Anti- Records would like you to believe that they resurrected soul singer Bettye LaVette from the dead. I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, her first record for the imprint, features a shadowy, yellowed portrait of LaVette that looks more like a death mask, exaggerating the wrinkles along her mouth until they are canyons, which is not quite the image to celebrate her revitalization in mainstream consciousness.
By contrast, Ms. LaVette, now 59, is alive and kicking. She won a W.C. Handy Award for best blues album for A Woman Like Me just last year. Live, she’s as fiery as ever, with a punkish ’do and a flattering black jumpsuit that shows off her stair-mastered gams as she prowls the stage.
Despite having Joe Henry in the producer’s chair, LaVette’s record is the polar opposite of that of Anti-’s other “resurrected” soul artist, Solomon Burke. Lithe where Burke is rotund, kinetic where Burke’s 2002 album Don’t Give Up on Me tended toward the lugubrious, LaVette still is her own woman. She cherry-picks from the catalogs of female singer-songwriters like Sinéad O’Connor, Rosanne Cash and Aimee Mann, in contrast to the parade of fawning songsmiths like Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and Brian Wilson who came to pay homage to the King of Soul.
LaVette was never Queen, barely even a bridesmaid. Whereas most soul singers got their start in church, LaVette’s roots were secular. She shuffled between tiny ’60s soul imprints like Scepter, Calla and Karen, releasing tiny gems along the way, but her time at Motown was short-lived, and the album she made in Muscle Shoals for Atco was mysteriously scrapped by the label.
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This 43-year trip of label-to-label disappointment gets turned into emotional ammo on LaVette’s version of Lucinda Williams’ “Joy.” With Doyle Bramlett II’s chunky lick as her base, LaVette faces the frustration at every whistle-stop, her plea for “Joy” evolving into a defiant mantra. Always moving, LaVette is also concerned with staying grounded, her feet firmly planted in her versions of both Joan Armatrading’s “Down to Zero” and Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream.”
So while women wrote all of the songs on the album, the genres in which they work are scattered outside the domain of soul: pop, folk, country, alt-rock. In concert, LaVette explains that they are not so much different genres as different dialects, and her role is to make them “fit into my mouth.” But that’s nothing new for LaVette, whose career was made on contorting songs to fit her mold. Her pleading on “Let Me Down Easy” rendered a country tune into a cathartic example of deep soul, and on Joe Simon’s “Your Turn to Cry,” the title becomes a curse unto the suddenly moist-eyed audience.
LaVette’s reading of O’Connor’s stark, haunting “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” is both raspy and reverb-free, and such a paring down of studio-smooth sound gives crucial space for the rough-hewn texture of her voice. With just a nylon-string to accompany her on the Bobbie Cryner ballad “Just Say So,” she slowly wrenches the lines to capture every kink and emotional fluctuation.
The simmering pace doesn’t work for everything, sometimes slowing the not quite 40-minute album to a crawl, but it’s worth it to get to the finale. For Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream,” LaVette embodies and emboldens the already insolent sneer, her husky voice and many years revealing a strength and wisdom that Fiona’s days have yet to learn.