(2021) Janet Batch - You Be the Wolf
Review:
Janet Batch grew up in the Rust Belt on a dairy farm in the small town of Litchfield. She is a now resident in the Finger Lakes region of New York. While Batch may have been raised on the country radio stations of the ’70s and ’80s, her sound, as can be heard on her second album You Be the Wolf, is firmly old school country of the Wells, Jackson and Lynn persuasion. It opens on the midtempo waltzing ‘If I Had a Nickel’, her twang-tinged warble and the track’s equally twanged guitar custom-built for a last dance track on the honky-tonk jukebox, a number about being hit on by wannabe Casanovas in the audience and their sexist mentality as she remarks, “every woman in here’s been in my shoes before/upstaged by some man with one eye on his hands and one eye on the door”, flipping him the finger with “quit talkin’ about my singin’ and keep your eyes off my jeans/boy you oughta know that your quarter won’t work in my machine”. Heading down into Wanda Jackson pastures and with a slight yodel in her voice, Waiting On Horses is a scampering rockabilly country track that cuts through the cowboy macho notion that women don’t have a lick of horse sense. The narrator is forbidden to ride by her father and learns to hold her tongue (“lest I wanted to see the back side of your hand”), but finally casting off the halter as she sings “I’m unbridled and uncautioned and I’m heading to the auction/to bid on every pony yellow brown and blue…going to get as many as I am able”. Busting out of the corral of male oppression, she promises to “ride into the sun” and “every thing I’ve ever loved and everything I’ve ever lost/I’m gonna throw ‘em in a deep dark hole with you”. Moving into Spaghetti Western landscapes, complete with Morricone whistling and hollow slow walk rhythm drums, Radio speaks of loving an ageing musician still looking for approbation (“I thought it was too late for you but here they are/they want to know where they can hang your star”), musing “does that sort of thing really make a man anyway”, concluding with the achingly sad lines “you wanted empty and I gave you more empty than you could stand/and I’ll be right here where you left me in case you need me in time”. It’s So Easy, from whence the album title comes, is nothing more or less than a rollicking twangy love song (“everything’s so easy when I’m with you/you make me feel like I’m a hundred years old/you make me feel like I’m brand new”), while, named after a childhood neighbour who attempted suicide in the mid-1980s, in the bouncy Lovetta, worn down by life with an oblivious husband and a fussy baby, she dolls herself up and heads off out into the woods to kill herself wrapped in a plastic sheet, only to have her plans scuppered and told to stop acting foolish and to get her ass back home. Opening slowly before turning into a stomping two-step, Got No Idea again talks of how women get taken for granted (“I get up at six and I work til six at night and all you do is bitch if your dinner ain’t fixed just right”) and lament how, having given up everything for him, “all I know’s I’ve got a man who ain’t never treated me the way he should…not a god damn thing but saddle me with this ring”. Tammy Wynette, she’s not. Another honky tonk waltzer, Bridgewater mines a similar story (“I should just start drinking instead of thinking ‘bout you when you go/I should start ramblin’ instead of gamblin’ on if you’ll be home/I should start runnin’ just as fast as these wheels can spin/‘stead of wasting all my lovin’ on the same old thing again”). Marking a distinct musical shift, Too Much For Me is a sparse blues about a troubled mother-daughter relationship (“Every time I open up my mouth I break her in two without even knowing/every time I apologize I don’t realized I just tore somethin’ else wide open”), describing a scenario most parents of daughters will recognise in “heaven knows how many times she changed her clothes/I just prayed to god she wouldn’t go nowhere dressed like that and when she did I swear I thought she was someone else’s’ she didn’t care how she was makin’ me so mad”). Ultimately though, there’s pride and admiration in her resilience, “what could I do with someone who’s been through all she’s been through and still somehow ain’t never run out of love”. It ends with a brace of story songs, first up being the slow strum and mournful steel of Side By Side, recounting two childhood friends whose lives went down very different paths (“I caught the first train I found that was headed south/while you hit bottle and hit the throttle and ricocheted around that town…Dave he offered me a job and I jumped at the chance to leave and somebody offered you a needle and all it wants to do is weasel its way back up your sleeve”), and now “I’ve got a man and a piece of land you’ve got yourself your methadone”, ending with the downbeat line “neither one of us is ever winning/yeah ‘cause the high road and the low road yeah they both go to the same place”. And, finally, steeped in further melancholia and memories despite its jauntier rhythm, Sara Anne is based on the true story of a local girl, 12-year-old Sara Anne Wood, who disappeared in 1993 and was never found, translated into a narrative about long parted friends (“your name it don’t come up much in conversations anymore but you’ve been on my mind more often than not”): one who took off to live in the mountains with the ice and snow, while the other stayed in a town that’s now dying on its feet, her faith along with it. The line “I wonder if anybody’s tryin to get out in the trees to find you”, echoing the search in Lovetta, it closes on a heartbreaking note as she sings “I hope I live long enough to see you on the news or get a knock at my door telling me you’re alright they just found you alive”.
Track Listing:
1. If I Had a Nickel
2. Waiting on Horses
3. Radio
4. It's so Easy
5. Lovetta
6. Got No Idea
7. Bridgewater
8. Too Much for Me
9. Side by Side
10. Sara Anne
Media Report:
Genre: americana, country
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
