„in my own time“
(Just Sunshine, 1971)
I don’t know why or how it came but I bought this
album because it was popping up everywhere I looked suddenly. With the
re-vival of Vashti
Bunyan, Freak Folk roots, Devandra Banhart and Nick Cave
naming Dalton as huge influences (a closer look at Dalton’s “Katie
Cruel” and Cave’s “When I first came to town” puts Cave close to a
copyright infringement..., though of course “Katie Cruel” is a
traditional), and so on. Bob Dylan said something about her in his own
unique Dylan-way, that nobody understood but it led to her records being
re-released. The Band (another recent obsession of mine from the early
days of rock music) wrote the song “Katies been gone” about her. And
ever since I have been listening to these songs daily. Sometimes twice.
Yeah, pr works and I am happy about it, this time around.
What is the magic of this record? I don’t know, I can
only describe its effect: I feel warm all over when she sings the first
lines of the first song on “In my own time” which is “something on
your mind”, I get goosepumps when she turns into the otherwise
non-descript “How sweet it is (to be loved by you)”, and so on. There
are a hundred highlights and tension-points on these ten songs. The songs
themselves, none of them written by Dalton by the way, she is a singer
(and banjo player...) not a songwriter, range from deeply touching to
outright superficial, but Karen Dalton adds her own emotional magic touch
to them and lifts them higher than otherwise imaginable. Well, that’s it
in a nutshell. But don’t underestimate this please, just listen to the
way she turns an overused song like “When a man loves a woman”
(undestroyable, Percy Sledge) into something new, exciting and different,
and that effect still works more than 35 years later.
Musically, there are folk songs, blues songs with an
almost rock touch, jazzy standards that are close to torchlight crooning
(“Take Me”) and the latter ones are why I don’t agree with her
nickname “the folksinger’s answer to Billy Holliday” because I find
she is rather Nina Simone. They share the same unique nasal tone in the
voice. Oh yeah, the voice. I guess her voice is the make or break point
for new listeners. I can’t get enough of it these days. Some instantly
say: put it off. What will they say about Anthony Haggerty in a few
decades? Or Joanna Newsom? Her voice is jaded, like a siren at times,
sometimes mushy, but able to reach notes in excellent phrasing, but most
of all full of emotion and honest. When she sings, you believe her. She is
filled with melancholy and glee in “when a man loves a woman”,
desperate in “Katie Cruel”, chilly to the bone on “Take me” and
something I cannot name in “something on your mind”. She sings softly,
and therefore much stronger than other singers who sing really loud.
Jesus, listening to this you start to think that Janis Joplin is nothing
but a show off. (Not true, not true!!)
