No ‘maybe’ about it: flawless bedrock americana through and through.
There are a lot of typical americana topics on the ten tracks of Texas singer-songwriter Helene Cronin’s third album, ‘Maybe New Mexico’. We start off in ‘Copperhill’ in a mining town turned environmental nightmare, dally with a volatile but irresistible lover somewhere in Texas on ‘Power Lines’, and later beat a wary path around a troubled war veteran (this one pretty much anywhere in the United States, sadly) on ‘Rifleman’. Other very familiar emotional/social questions on ‘Maybe New Mexico’ include religious belief and doubt, disintegrating relationships, a string of lonesome desert towns and states through which the singer wanders mourning her lost love…heck, there’s even a song which – although it’s actually about leaving the world a better place than we found it – has the same title as a well-known brand of Bourbon whiskey.
But so what? Time and again, what makes an americana album work is when it dusts down time-honoured subject matter and turns it into musical gold dust with unexpected new directions and perspectives, which is exactly what Helene Cronin does for the overwhelming majority of her latest album, all of it stunning effect. Extraordinarily vivid opening lines like:
“He crawled through the mud of a cabbage farm in Germany,
Sharpshooter doing grunt work in the infantry”
on ‘Rifleman’, for example, are just the introduction of a fresh angle to the oft-visited story of a mind-blasted war veteran,
“They sent him off a boy
Brought him back a wreck
Nightmares, bombshells, shrapnel
Still exploding in his head”
where resoundingly direct lines about his condition like these then pull away to outline the suffering and fear experienced by his relatives as a knock-on result:
“I’d find his whiskey in the hamper
Under the dirty clothes
Shouldn’t own a 30-ought-6 [The standard US Army WWII rifle]
And a hair trigger temper you can’t control.”
This use of other points of view, not just the war veteran himself, to bring a fresh outlook to the table isn’t limited to one song, though. The more you listen to ‘Maybe New Mexico’ the clearer it becomes Cronin has an extraordinary talent for pulling out skein after skein of vivid, passionately felt imagery and predicaments and taking unusual, multiple perspectives on them. Another striking example is ‘Switzerland‘, where a familiar tale of a marriage falling apart and the collateral damage it can cause comes straight off the americana supermarket aisle of generic subject matter. On the other hand, to have a chorus as original as
“Let the fallout fall, we’re both losing friends
There’s no neutral ground, in their defense
We drew such hard lines at the bitter end
There’s no such place as Switzerland.”
The song uses Switzerland’s well-known refusal to take sides in wars is a great way of underlining how nobody, friends or otherwise, can stay out of this particular conflict. In the process, that gives what would be a fairly standard topic a way lengthier, more interesting kind of shelf life. The music itself follows pretty much the same guiding principle as the lyrics. Without straying too far from time-honoured, conventional tenets of mid-paced, melodic country ballads as its bedrock, very much of the Nanci Griffith/classic Texas Americana variety and using a full band production throughout, ‘Maybe New Mexico’ also tips the musical cart in sufficiently different directions and with enough changes of pace and tone to keep your attention from wandering. Yet within such ultra-solid, dependable foundations on the lyrics and musical front, the themes of impermanence and perpetual movement, of border towns and frontier states and equally edgy thoughts and existentialist issues runs deep. This ranges from the uncertainty suggested by the album title – ‘Maybe New Mexico’ – right the way through to the final track of ‘Visitors’ – which may be about people gathering together, but which concludes with the pointed reminder that
‘We’re all passing through the same revolving door
Living, dying, borrowing the years
We’re just visitors here’
You could say that when it comes to handling such subject matters as mortality without ever labouring the point or getting overly serious is a fine balancing act at the best of times, but ‘Maybe New Mexico’ walks it in style. Take ‘Not the Year’, for example where Cronin opens up proceedings by asking an artfully straightforward question with some pretty mind-shattering answers.
“What if you were told on the day you were born
The day you’d die, just not the year []
Would it be a birthday party or would you wear black
Would you spend the day looking up or looking back?”
It’s probably no coincidence that arguably the album’s weakest song, ‘Ain’t That Just Like A Man’, boils down to a list of the positive qualities of her life partner without any of these constantly changing perspectives or deeper internal debates. But if that’s a low point, at the opposite end of the spectrum, you’d be pushed to find a flaw to her account of post-breakup loneliness on the title track, ploughing up and down the desert states and towns in a solitary, futile bid to outrun her memories of a former lover:
“Didn’t have a reason for stopping there
Sure didn’t have a reason to stay
‘Thought I might try Albuquerque
Just ’cause I like the name”
She observes with yet another appealing feature of the album – its touches, here and there, of dry humour to keep the gloom at bay.
Like this album in general, in fact, ‘Maybe New Mexico’ is a track that travels far and wide in a very short space. But whether it’s simply wanting to hear a healthy dose of traditional, faultlessly produced, mid-range americana and/or getting some resoundingly fresh perspectives on time-honoured issues, every minute of the whole of this warmhearted, relentlessly thoughtful musical journey is most definitely worth hearing.
