“This is a masterclass in songwriting,” Diane said midway through Kasey Chambers’ new album, Backbone, aka the soundtrack to our morning excursion into Chapel Hill for breakfast. It’s more than that, however. It’s a remarkable collection of songs that twists and turns through the heart and soul like few others I’ve heard not just this year, but in all my years. It encompasses the entirety of country music, just about, from its rural roots to its more urban variations, and adds dashes of the blues, bluegrass and gospel, to boot.
It leaves me in hyperbolic mode, in other words.
On the way home, while navigating the increasingly busy 15/501, I inadvertently triggered the Mazda3 Time Machine’s flux capacitor while flying through a yellow light. Boom! In a flash, we found ourselves in the front row at Kasey’s 2017 show at the World Cafe Live in Philly, where she, Grizzly Bear and her son, Arlo, rolled country, rock and the blues into a spiritual spliff of a show. Boom! We jumped to the Point in Bryn Mawr in 2000, where she and her crack band batted us about like a cat playing with a mouse.
The 15-track Backbone opens with “A New Day Has Come,” which finds her vowing to be a north star. “When the road has gone dark/I’ll shine on your trail and show you the way/When the river runs dry/I’ll pray for the rain to wash away your pain/And if you get lost/I’ll lead you back home, won’t leave you alone/When the wind blows.” What’s remarkable to me is that, despite the decades that have weathered us, she sounds remarkably the same as that fresh-faced young woman at the Point.
As I mentioned upon its release as a single, “Backbone (The Desert Child)” conjures her first album, The Captain, and as such is akin to pulling on a favorite flannel shirt. The same can be said of the other songs here, including “A Love Like Springsteen,” which follows. Expressing her longing for love via Bruce Springsteen songs may sound like a silly novelty number, but it’s anything but. It aches: “It’s not enough to compete/Lining up for a race in the street/In the dust, there’s a devil asleep/But this hungry heart needs to eat.”
“Dart N Feather,” for its part, is a brooding Appalachian-tinged tale about the devil, the Lord and music, while “For Better or Worse” turns a wedding cliche into a heartfelt vow. “Little Red Riding Hood” ups the charm quotient while turning the fairy tale into bluesy fun. “Silverado Girl,” much like the first two tracks, embraces the alt.country vibe that accent Kasey’s early albums; it features a vocal that’s both restrained and heartfelt.
Chambers revisits her ill-fated marriage to Shane Nicholson by way of a surprisingly sweet duet with him in “The Divorce Song”: “We may have left our run too late/Walked down the aisle too soon/But not everything has a forever ring/We sure ain’t no Johnny and June.” The next song, “Arlo,” celebrates the son that came from their union.
“Broken Cup” asks pertinent questions about the contradictions that accent life. Are we truly rich when impoverished souls subsist on the street? The gospel-infused hymn “My Kingdom Come,” a moving duet with Ondara, serves as a reminder of the promises that awaits us. It’s followed by the bluesy “Something to Believe In,” in which Kasey asks for something— or someone—to latch onto before she takes her final breath. It sets the stage for the bluegrass-flavored “Take Me Down the Mountain,” while the tender “You Are Everything to Me” essentially answers the questions she’s posed in the preceding songs.
The album comes to a close with the rip-roaring rendition of Eminem’s “Lose Again” that went viral a few years back. Much like “A Love Like Springsteen,” the idea behind it may teeter on silly but in practice it’s anything but. It’s audacious, for sure, compelling and raucous, and—like the album as a whole—absolutely riveting.
The Old Grey Cat 