Soul singer Bettye LaVette is a perfect interpreter of other people’s words. She’s a songwriter’s dream and should be a national treasure. Instead, she has only flirted with the type of mainstream success that should have been hers decades ago if things like chart position were based on sheer talent alone. A bit of a star-crossed singer, LaVette has landed on the R&B charts numerous times, but when it came to crossing over to the pop charts – she was many times the bridesmaid and never the bride. Thankfully, that has never kept her from being highly respected, if not jealously horded, by a handful of the more artsy of artists. But then again, who can blame them for locking up a jewel like this!
The smoky-voiced singer’s latest effort, I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise (Anti-) probably won’t send her thundering up the charts, but that’s only a statement about where the mindset of mainstream music is these days because, LaVette’s album is truly a winner. She set herself up for a challenge by choosing to record an eclectic collection of tunes originally made famous by such varied artists as Dolly Parton, Aimee Man, Sinead O’Connor and Fiona Apple. However, this lady obviously knows what she’s doing!
She makes one of her strongest statements right away on the opening track with the Sinead O’Connor song “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got”. While the Irish hellion was an emotional singer, some of her songs got weighted down by overly shiny 1980s type production values. LaVette makes the right choice here by dropping everything but the words and when they’re filtered through her world-weary voice, they are amazingly powerful.
Just to show that soulful is not the only trick she has in her big black bag of magic; LaVette goes funky on the Lucinda Williams penned tune “Joy” and the Aimee Mann song “How Am I Different”. The former has her rocking like a queen of old-school R&B, while the latter finds her flaunting her saucy side. Aimee Mann is by no means a shy violet, but when LaVette takes on this song, she lands the question of “How Am I Different?” like a walloping punch instead of a biting quip like Mann did.
If any one song though, shows the true artistry of this woman, it has to be her take on the classic Dolly Parton song “Little Sparrow”. This was one of the country icon’s more serious songs, but her bouncy effervescent personality always kept the song from having too dark of a shading. Well, LaVette is not afraid to pull the shade on the sun and give the powerful words all of the power and pain they deserve. She brings a sense of gravity to the song that, when I think back on it, was always missing from the original.
Only time will tell if Bettye LaVette ever earns her rightful place in the annals of music history, but whether she does or not, don’t pity this woman – she’s always raised her own kind of hell! |