It’s hard to picture Kacey Musgraves, Lindi Ortega and or even Carrie Underwood to name a few without Patty Loveless. The country music star of the late Eighties and Nineties formed a bridge from the golden era of country in the Sixties and Seventies to the bright emerging stars of today. Alongside Jo Dee Messina and Kelly Willis, Loveless’ string of hit singles and albums made her the biggest star of her time and a promulgator of neotraditional country.
It’s hard sometimes to forget just how big a star she was. Loveless accumulated a half-dozen country singles and five platinum albums within a period of less than a decade.
How much time has passed since then? Well Loveless had her first Greatest Hits album in 1993 which is more than two decades ago. As an artist, she has been making records over three decades into the 2000’s but we haven’t had a new album since Mountain Soul II released in 2009.
Thus the new double CD Honky Tonk Year Angel: The MCA Years was one that caught my eye. It is a tip of the hat to her third album and first million-seller. It packs in just about all of her first five albums recorded for MCA beginning with the self-titled debut Patty Loveless and that continues through Up Against My Heart right before she left for Epic Records.
Loveless’ soaring voice makes country music seem cinematic. Her lover’s plea in “Don’t Toss Us Away” could fill a concert hall as easily as the big screen soundtrack. In “Can’t Stop Myself From Loving You,” Loveless takes you back to another era like you’re in a in a honky tonk bar during Patsy Cline’s day. In “A Little Bit In Love,” a song written by Steve Earle, you might feel like you’re in a roadhouse in Patsy’s time with its boogie swing and classic western guitar twang.
The set has classic country roots with Loveless channeling Hank Williams in a big band influenced arrangement of “I Can’t Get You Off of My Mind.” Loveless fronts a band that really swings with classic fiddle and piano breaks with her voice playing a foil for the back and forth fiddle lines that are woven in like a conversation between the two.
“Hurts Me So Bad (In a Real Good Way)” draws from pop tradition like the catchy playfulness of the Beatles “Words of Love.” “Timber I’m Falling” is a nice play off of the song Elvis Presley made famous by writer Dallas Frazier. Loveless turns in a terrific cover of Frazier’s “If My Heart Had Windows” which is one of the seminal country songs and has been covered by so many it would be hard to count. If “Chains” makes you think you’re going to hear the Beatles song, it’s also great country pop
“I Did” features great straight-ahead piano and pedal steel around a classic bridge. On “After Love,” Loveless plays the love struck victim against a gorgeous acoustic guitar backdrop. Sometimes Loveless just reaches back and lets it rip in “Some Blue Moons Ago.” The song “Jealous Bone” not so subtly borrows from Heart’s classic guitar rock riff in “Even It Up.”
Going back in time is revelatory but also makes you feel like you’re stuck in time. Sometimes the production sounds dated and Loveless doesn’t have the breathing room that marked some of the great classic records of the Sixties and Seventies. A song like “Fly Away” where Loveless seems like just part of the mix makes you wonder what it would be like to hear her and the song more stripped down–and Loveless’ voice being less than just an element of the total arrangement.
Listening closely through the compilation brings the occasional jewel of a great line. In “On Down The Line,” which conjures the stridency of Merle Haggard’s “Big Boss Man,” Loveless confides “I can’t get no satisfaction and my tractor can’t get no traction.” And in “I’m That Kind of Girl,” she lets you know “A little sensitivity gets to me every time.”
One might think that Honky Tonk Angel: The MCA Years in all its breadth tells the whole story but it more of a snapshot in time. But for Loveless her greatest hits were yet to come. By the time she left MCA, she’d have more than three platinum and another gold album enjoying her greatest stretch of success during the mid-Nineties.
Honky Tonk Angel: The MCA Years is where it all began and for Loveless, the best was yet to come.
Originally posted here.
