Voices like Trisha Yearwood's don't come along very often—in country or any other kind of music. Her straightforward style has struck a responsive chord that stretches across musical boundaries, due in part to the unself-conscious ease with which she glides from country to pop to folk.
Like her spiritual mentor, Linda Ronstadt, Yearwood, 29, simply stands there and belts them out, letting the tags fall where they may. On her splendid new release, The Song Remembers When, Yearwood's vocals range from subdued folk (the introspective "Hard Promises to Keep") to cocky rock (the boogying "If I Ain't Got You"), to pop melodrama (the torch-carrying "Lying to the Moon"), and when she latches on to a great melody, such as Jude Johnstone's stunning country ballad, "The Nightingale," the results are riveting.
Throughout these performances, Yearwood intelligently shifts her perspective and maneuvers her voice to extract the essence from each song. Just three albums into her career, Yearwood seems to have already ensured that looking back years from now, the song will indeed remember when. (MCA)
The Pet Shop Boys
Since 1985, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant have been the most commercially viable and the most potentially subversive standard-bearers for the gay subculture and aesthetic. Their fifth album may well be their most overt and politicized release to date. Musically, Very covers much of the familiar ground that the British duo have made their own since the late '80s: synth pop tarted up with a sniff of intellectualism and a dash of orchestral campiness.
"Can You Forgive Her?" sets the album's tone. With his clipped "pass the Grey Poupon" elocution, Tennant talks/sings his way through a mid-tempo dance track about a man torn between his female lover and his closeted desire for a man. Though reasons for the breakup are never broadcast, the listener is in classic PSB territory. Once again, the boys dispense delicious fluff with a steely bite. Their love songs are romantic yet weary with an AIDS-era melancholia that transforms the ridiculous (a cover of the Village People's "Go West," replete with he-man choruses) into the seductively sublime. (SBK/ERG)
Guru
In Jazzmatazz's artistic-statement-ahead intro, rapper Guru declares, "This is an experimental fusion of jazz and hip-hop," adding with professional seriousness that hip-hop, like jazz, is a "cultural expression based on reality."
No matter what Guru's intent, you can't deny Jazzmatazz's groove. He hooks up with musicians Branford Marsalis, Courtney Pine, Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd and singers N'dea Davenport (who steals the show on the sassy "Trust Me") and Carleen Anderson. The result is more acid jazz (a hybrid of rap, funk and jazz) than traditional jazz and not half as experimental as Guru would like you to think, but the excursion has its fluid, funky moments. Among them: "Transit Ride," a subway travelogue that's sure to upset New York City officials, and "Le Bien, Le Mal," a showcase for the U.S. debut of Parisian star MC Solaar. A French-speaking rapper throwing down over American pop/jazz tracks says more about hip-hop's importance than any of Guru's well-intentioned preaching. (Chrysalis)
The Juliana Hatfield Three
She poses for photos in big old Doc Martens and delivers lyrics—in a fragile, little-girl voice—about hating everyone, wanting to be cool and playing spin the bottle. Yet Hatfield's second solo album offers clues that she may be more complex than, say, a character on Beverly Hills 90210.
Though she has announced that insecurity about her musical ability sometimes makes her suicidal, she plays lead guitar on her pert new pop songs with rollicking confidence. She is equally artful at writing fictional lyrics that seem true. The sweet song "My Sister" is full of convincing details about young sisters, though in fact Hatfield has no sister. It is this contradiction between her mature skills and her naive image that makes this artist such an intriguing performer. (Atlantic)
>Trisha Yearwood
MIXING BUSINESS WITH PLEASURE
PROJECTING THE IMAGE OF A PRETTY woman who's also smart and strong is important to country's current golden girl, Trisha Yearwood. The daughter of a banker and a schoolteacher, she and her older sister, Beth, grew up in tiny Monticello, Ga. (pop. 2,000), just south of Atlanta. "We were taught that it was okay to be independent and intelligent—that you could be all that and still be feminine," she says. "I think that's one of the reasons women have become such a force in country music over the last few years. More of them are saying it's perfectly all right to be these things—and, like me, they're singing about it."
Yearwood started singing professionally while studying for a business degree at Nashville's Belmont College in 1985 and worked as a demo and background vocalist before releasing her first solo album in 1991. Since then, her whirlwind ride to the top of the country heap has often made her feel, she says, "like my career was a racehorse, and I was just hanging on for dear life.
"Starting a career is a lot like starting a new business," she adds. "You know you're going to lose money, and you know you're always going to be tired. You also know you're going to have to sacrifice a lot of your personal life to get things accomplished." Those sacrifices may have contributed to the breakup of her five-year marriage to musician Christopher Latham in 1991. Today, with her third album on track and plans to wed guitarist Robert Reynolds in the works, Yearwood says, "I'm finally starting to feel like I'm in sync with my career—and my life."
- Contributors:
- Billy Altman,
- Amy Linden,
- Michael Small.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
