Review: Careless Love by Madeline Peyroux

I originally talked briefly about this cd when I bought as a birthday present to myself, back in November of last year. I've been listening to the first several tracks almost every morning, courtesy of my CD player/alarm clock.

The CD features songs by a wide range of singer-songwriters (L Cohen, Dylan, Hank Williams). Ms Peyroux is backed by competent jazz quartet (piano, bass, guitar, & drum), which has grown on me with repeated listenings. When I first wrote about the cd, I was not complimentary of this jazz combo — I think I called in MOR night-club jazz. After repeated listenings, I believe I was unfair. There's colorations in the arrangements I didn't notice in my initial, somewhat superficial, first listen.

It may sound like a gimmick, but there's a couple of tracks where she sounds like Billie Holliday and a couple of others where she sounds like Nina Simone or Sarah Vaughn.

However, there's more to it than gimmick. She's got some chops in her own voice too. And unerring instincts in how to interpret the song. Right now, my favorite tracks are 1 and 5. The opening track is a song by Leonard Cohen, "Dance Me to the End of Love"; this is one where she sounds like Lady Day. The quartet plays a hopping little figure (based on a similar figure in the original), then she dives in: "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin / Dance me through the panic til I'm gathered safely in / Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove / Dance me to the end of love."

Track five, "Between the Bars" by Steven Paul Smith, is an almost tuneless thing which is nevertheless chilling. After hearing it several times, I've come to think of it as the bottle singing a lullaby to an alcoholic:

Drink up baby, stay up all night
Things you could do, you won't but you might
The potential you'll be you'll never see
Promises you'll only make

Drink up with me now and forget all about
Pressures of days, do what I say
And I'll make you ok, drive them away
Images stuck in your head

Another favorite is her cover of Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go." I hear a melancholy in Ms. Peyroux's version which is not immediately apparant in Dylan's original (from his classic Blood on the Tracks). Dylan's original is bouncy, almost joyous in performance — you can almost hear him laughing at himself. There's a funhouse irony going on; the bounciness of the music seems to belie the sadness implicit in the lyrics. That is to say, you would not expect a song with the word "Lonesome" in the title to be this bouncy.

But Ms. Peyroux's cover takes its time with the song. For example, she lingers just the appropriate amount of time on the final word in the line "[love's] never been so easy, nor so slow." This is not to say that her cover is bluesy; nor do I mean to imply that her cover is superior to Dylan's original. In my humble, it just adds an additional tint to the song.

Madeline Peyroux, Careless Love. Recommended.