Music
By Katie Dodd
Sara Evans
Real Fine Place (RCA)
Faith Hill
Fireflies (Warner Bros.)
Gretchen Wilson once claimed that “Redneck Woman,” the surprise smash of 2004 that turned country on its head, was inspired by watching the glossy divas on CMT and thinking, “I’ll never look like that.”
Redneck or not, women everywhere could relate.
It’s amusing, then, in the wake of Wilson’s blaze of glory, to see two of country’s reigning glam girls, Faith Hill and Sara Evans, scramble to rediscover their country roots on their latest albums, Evans’ Real Fine Place and Hill’s Fireflies. Is that really our couture-clad Faith gleefully proclaiming, “Good morning, dearly beloved, I’d like to welcome y’all / To see the side effects of sex and alcohol,” on the white-trash-wedding-style “Dearly Beloved”?
But while it might be tempting to scoff at their attempts to recapture country’s heart, to do so would be to ignore the fact that each of these women has made one of the best albums of her career.
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It’s not just the first-rate songwriting from stalwarts like Darrell Scott, Radney Foster and Georgia Middleman. Or the wicked fun of songs like “Dearly Beloved” and “Coalmine,” Evans’ lusty, dusty fiddle-fueled ode to her blue-collar hunk. There’s something deeper that recommends both Fireflies and Real Fine Place—a marked interest in telling a new kind of story, and the emotional resonance that results.
“Roll Me Back in Time,” a Sheryl Crow tune, finds Evans stepping into the role of a teenage bride whose husband abandons her to follow his Hollywood dreams. As it unfolds, the song reveals itself as more than just a straightforward lament: though she clearly longs for his return, the wife harbors a lingering regret that she’s sealed her fate by marrying so young.
There’s a bit of this particular woman—young, poor, doomed by her choices—in many of the characters on these albums. She’s in the broken and betrayed lover in Evans’ “Cheatin’,” as well as in the wife of the alcoholic in Hill’s “If You Ask.”
And hers is the future faced by the heroine in Real Fine Place’s “Bible Song.” Plenty of songs in recent memory have sung the praises of small-town life, in a thinly veiled and often disingenuous attempt to ingratiate themselves to some radio programmer’s idea of country’s core audience. But here we see the other side: “They marry young in these parts / They work the factories / So I ran as fast as I could…so no one would sing some Bible song over me.”
It’s a masterful song, filled with pent-up frustration and determination—the longing of someone who sees her fate laid out in detail and is terrified. By the time the soaring “hallelujahs” herald her escape, we’re fully invested in this one woman’s triumph.
“Bible Song” was written by Lori McKenna, until this year a largely unknown singer-songwriter who managed to score three cuts on Hill’s Fireflies, including the title track. (As a result, Warner Bros. recently rereleased McKenna’s 2004 album, “Bittertown.”) It’s not difficult to see why. A 36-year-old mother of five, she writes songs that employ simple, concise lyrics that nonetheless cut deep, painting multilayered, evocative portraits of the complicated lives of women and the ways in which their dreams both sustain them and let them down.
McKenna provides Fireflies with its high point in “Stealing Kisses,” which describes a woman standing alone in her kitchen, enveloped in her fantasies. She relives the excitement of her courtship, only to reflect, “I was stealing kisses from a boy / Now I’m begging affection from a man”—and to imagine racing over to the high school to warn the young girls to “run, run, run.” It’s a devastating four minutes, infinitely more powerful than the bland ballads we’re so used to hearing Hill belt (like the album’s obligatory duet with husband Tim McGraw, “Like We Never Loved at All”). It’s hard not to feel hopeful that this could be the new direction of country music—songs that speak directly to the hearts of fans in a way that offers understanding rather than just pandering. Songs that validate not only their lives, but also their pain.
What’s impressive about these two albums is not how far the former crossover stars step outside their comfort zones. It’s how completely they manage to embrace the personas of these women so removed from their own experience. Of course, both Evans and Hill will tell you that these perspectives are not far from their upbringings—Evans’ childhood on a farm in rural Missouri, and Hill’s life in tiny Star, Miss. Hill declared her return to country music with little nuance in the album’s first single: “They might know me all around the world / But y’all I’m still a Mississippi girl.” From Evans, we get the suspiciously similar “Missing Missouri”: “Every time my bus wheels hit the boot hill / There’s no limelight and I’m all right.”
Neither song quite pulls off what it intends to do, which is to persuade the audience that these shiny-haired women are, in fact, just like them. That they try is understandable, given that the greatest sin in country music is, and really always has been, to “get above your raisin’.” But it’s hard to imagine that the desperate housewives in songs like McKenna’s would feel terribly sorry that Evans gets tired of “hoping that your song’ll sell / and having to smile when it ain’t doing well.”
Still, within the context of the two albums, these songs providing a compelling counterpoint to the small-town experience. “These Four Walls,” which closes Real Fine Place, is a bittersweet tune about dreams lost and found, through the eyes of a woman who gave up starry-eyed aspirations to raise a family, but who after some soul-searching now accepts that “in these four walls, I’m a queen.”
It’s a lovely complement to Evans’ biographical effort, and to the heroine of “Bible Song,” a gentle reminder that life isn’t black-and-white. Small-town life isn’t always idyllic, but for some it’s everything they’ve hoped for. By the same token, fame may be an escape for one and a trap for another.
But what all these women have in common, Hill and Evans included, is the tension between the lives they dream of and the lives they have. As child bearers, there’s a fate that often seems both difficult to avoid and impossible to resist. As independent beings, there’s a yearning to make another kind of mark on the world, to be something other than a Mrs. and a mom. These conflicts play out differently for every woman, as the intersection of dreams and reality inspire and inform choices that lead us down divergent paths. But for all of us, these dreams are both the fuel that feeds us, and the hope that makes us restless. For better or worse, they’re what make us ourselves.
With these latest albums from two of country’s most visible women, suddenly we get an insight, an understanding of women that has long been absent from the country charts, pushed aside by platitudes like “Girls Lie Too.” Here, finally, are songs about me.
Hallelujah.