Rod Picott and Amanda Shires' new album is unpretentious, but it shines.

Sew Your Heart With Wires

Rod Picott and Amanda Shires

Weldingrod Music/ Little Lambs Eat Ivy Music, 2008

CD Review by Jeff Trippe

Picott and Shires will appear at One Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine on Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 8:00 PM.

Trite comparisons can be frustrating for performers and writers.  Many working musicians – and especially acoustic musicians – do not think very hard about whom they might prefer to sound like.  The artist strives for originality, and in any case, oftentimes the most important voices in music cannot really be imitated anyway.  After all, when was the last time you heard a Townes Van Zandt cover band?

Still, such comparisons are part of the currency and language of reviewers and of listeners in general.  So, in an enterprise in which new writers and singers seem to emerge every day like bean sprouts (just check the growing list of aspirants on the Maine Songwriters Association rolls, for example), you will undoubtedly hear the following kind of conversation:

“You’d like her.  She sounds just like __________(insert the name of your favorite singer/songwriter).”

“Oh, yeah, I have heard her.  That song of hers, ‘You Can’t Wipe Your Boyfriend Off on the Couch,’ reminded me a lot of Bobby Zimmer’s “Like A Tumbling Boulder.”

All of this is simply to say that I hope to resist comparisons of the new disc by Rod Picott and Amanda Shires to other male/female teams such as, say, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Mark Knopfler and Emmy Lou Harris, or even Johnny Cash and June Carter.  It would be truer to say that a man and woman singing together in the context of a country song can be a means of expression powerful enough to transcend their very names.  For example, Picott and Shires’ “Little Darlin’” is a new murder ballad with the old tension created when bloody acts are described with sweet harmonies and poetic language.  Further, when Picott’s rugged vocals and simple, percussive guitar are combined with the sheer beauty that Shires offers on every track, what we get is that lonely, elusive country sound that says:  life out here ain’t golden, but it’s all we got.

Amanda Shires’ fiddling on this recording is stunning, really, and she never even needs to use that fifth gear that so many bluegrass fiddlers return to on nearly every song.  Her playing is restrained and evocative, and even though the metaphor has been tried before, I can only compare her to a painter:  she is a master of musical light and shadow, and her strokes are broad or meticulous as the tune and lyrics determine.  Yet tonally, there is something archetypal in her instrument – it is the sound that might have haunted your grandmother’s house.  Amanda’s bio information says that she is classically trained, but there’s no telling how much of that she had to unlearn in order to play like this.  She contributes true beauty on every track, but I especially love what she does on “Shake and Cry” and “Little Mean Girl (Ruby).”

On the other hand, Picott, a Maine native who now resides in Nashville, makes no pretense as a guitarist or vocalist.  His objective is the unadorned delivery of chords and words, and while his vocal range is not wide, he makes up for it on most songs with honesty.  It’s that approach which says, “I’m just gonna do what I do.  If you like it, then sit down on that motel bed and listen.  If not, then move along.”  Besides, he has Shires’ soft country-inflected voice alongside his for nuance and harmony.

The songs, all co-written by Picott and Shires, are rooted in tradition melodically, but they are also sophisticated and subtle story-poems which deserve close, repeated listening (which also means, unfortunately, that they probably won’t get much air play).  He is a New Englander, and she is from the West Texas plains, but these songs are most definitely southern gothic in tone and subject matter.  In fact, they are in the image of the mythical South, that place of strange appositions, created by writers such as Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, and it is only in such a context that one might hear a song which describes armed robbery and suicide (“Mean Little Girl”) followed by a tent-revival gospel number (“When You Get Your Story Told”).  Imagine black and white photographs of crooked landscapes, brutal killers in go-to-meetin’ suits and little spectacles, liquored-up prom queens…

The only objection I could pose is to the recording itself.  The disc was recorded and engineered by Picott but mixed and mastered in Nashville, and I think I understand pretty well why they chose to “wet it down” (engineer talk for adding a lot of reverb effect) so much in spots; it’s in keeping with the dark and distant feeling of the project overall, as if at times the music might be coming from the hotel bar across the street.  My personal taste, however, is for a crisper, “drier” sound, but again, most engineering and mixing choices are made for artistic reasons – in general, they are not mistakes.

If you want instrumental wizardry, comfortable rhymes, and note-perfect production, then don’t buy this record.  But if you want to hear what sorts of new things are presently being done using traditional instrumentation, singing, and chordal structure as a basic format for innovative and intelligent songwriting, then Sew Your Heart With Wires is one you should own.

You can get more information, including tour dates, about Rod Picott and Amanda Shires at their respective web pages. You can purchase "Sew Your Heart with Wire" at the web page for this duo project, or directly from the artists at their show at One Longfellow Square on April 9, 2009.