TWAS 133: Beth Nielsen Chapman

[glenn mcdonald]

The War Against Silence
www.furia.com/twas

Some Way Around These Stars
The War Against Silence #133, 14 August 97

Beth Nielsen Chapman: Sand and Water

I'm fond of saying that Beth Nielsen Chapman's self-titled 1990 album, her
pop debut after a decade of mostly writing country songs for other people
and singing backup on their records, is the only album I ever bought after
hearing it in a supermarket. This isn't really what happened, but the glib
assertion reveals, as glib assertions tend to, some truths that the real
story leaves out. In fact, I bought the album after hearing most of it
played in a record store while I shopped for something else (old Slayer and
Fugazi records, probably), an uncommon but hardly unique occurrence, and
only later did I hear it played in the supermarket. But the other way
around makes more sense. Sweet, soothing, sentimental and overwhelmingly
suburban, Beth Nielsen Chapman would sound much more at home drifting over
brightly-lit grocery-store aisles, filled with hurrying mothers and
restless children (not the one I heard it in, a 24-hour Star Market
populated largely, at three in the morning, by errant college students
looking for something to replace the chemicals that a normal human sleep
cycle would otherwise provide), than it did hovering, uncertainly, over the
shaved heads of beligerent teenagers flipping restlessly through bins of
NWA CDs. The clamor of the rest of music at the time (and now, still)
seemed fundamentally inimical to me to Beth's graceful, emotional and
unapologetically conventional songs, about memories, time, friendship,
hopes and regrets. The industry thrives on blasts of intensity,
rapaciously consumed; Beth Nielsen Chapman was as incongruous and
unmarketable as a posse of deferential skateboarders slamming teacups of
warm milk. And so I was a little self-conscious about liking it so much,
and the joke was a defense mechanism. I'm not the sort of person that
likes the music they play in supermarkets; I'm not so old yet that I
grumble about the noisy crap the kids like, and hold out something
formulaic and anachronistic as a paradigm they should follow; I don't drive
a mini-van and play records like this while I idle in the carpool line.
I'm as puzzled as you are by the fact that I own this.
But this isn't entirely true, either. I have lots of Adult
Contemporary records. I might have a slightly harder time programming a
day of it from my collection than I would a day of punk, or metal, or
power-pop, but only just. I love Nanci Griffith, and Del Amitri, and
"Little Victories" and "American Pie", and I even own one Bruce Hornsby
record, and while I haven't replaced my vinyl copy of Building the Perfect
Beast with a CD, neither have I gotten rid of it. Growing older shouldn't
be an excuse to turn your back on your childhood, or anybody else's, but
you can take in new things without jettisoning the old ones. Truth takes
many forms, and Beth's songs were no less honest or perceptive than Tori
Amos', or Ian MacKaye's, or Mark Eitzel's. And for me, at least, the
honesty was as evident in the music as the words, whatever its genre. I'm
too young to associate Grace of My Heart with the Brill Building
songwriters who really inspired it, so Beth has become the singer I see
behind Illeana Douglas' character. You have to transplant the story to
Nashville, and shift it forward a couple decades, but to me the commitment,
humility and awe are the same.
Which is why Beth's 1993 follow-up, You Hold the Key, struck me as a
crushing disappointment. The essential appeal of her style, to me, was its
simplicity and directness, and You Hold the Key, which attempted to
transform her into a sleek, Mariah/Whitney-esque diva, completely wrecked
the spell. I did not want to hear Beth Nielsen Chapman doing a slinky duet
with Paul Carrack. I did not want to see her hiding naked behind a mirror
on the cover. The transformation felt crass, calculated and insincere to
me, whatever its motivations were in fact, and I hated surrendering to
crass, calculated insincerity a voice that had been its antithesis. I try
very hard to give each record a chance to succeed on its own terms, rather
than trying to force it into another mold, just because it was the one I
was expecting, but every once in a while I come across an album that seems
to miss its own point so wildly (which isn't technically the same as
dishonesty, but isn't necessarily any more palatable, either) that
listening to it makes me feel aesthetically nauseous, and I'm forced to
turn it off before it destroys my faith in music itself. This could well
be premature, and/or unfair; maybe if I dug You Hold the Key, or Mark
Eitzel's West, or Richard Thompson's you? me? us? out of whatever box
they're still packed in, and put them on now, I'd find that enough of the
universe's particles are in different orbits that I'd hear something I
didn't hear the first time, and find a way to love them after all. But the
idea of playing them again, to find out, is too revolting to seriously
contemplate. They are lost to me. Life has too few days, and too many
songs I don't wince in anticipation of.
But I give up on artists much less readily than I give up on
individual albums, so I bought Sand and Water with the impervious hope that
it would find Beth back in human form. The four years since You Hold the
Key, I figured, was a period of artistic re-evaluation and re-grouping,
time for her to see the error of You Hold the Key's ways, and either find
new ways, or relocate the trails that lead through the old ones.
"Re-evaluation and re-grouping" turns out to have been correct, but my
profoundly inconsequential allergy to her previous album had nothing to do
with it: Beth's husband, Ernest, was diagnosed with cancer during Beth's
1993 tour, and died in August, 1994. I don't know anything real about
Beth's life, or Ernest's, but if her life resembles the lives of the
characters in her songs (and the simplest assumption is that it does), this
is the kind of blow from which she might not have recovered. In rock, of
course, death is part of the idiom of the form. Courtney survives Kurt
(and Yoko survives John, for that matter) in part because crazed fans and
lonely shotgun vigils are so firmly in character to begin with. Rock stars
are inherently fragile and evanescent. Their planes go down, their tour
buses overturn, they OD, they drown while swimming, they're shot in
drive-bys. Each loss is tragic, but the pattern is unsurprising. When
Kurt shot himself, nobody wailed "Why?", uncomprehendingly. We knew why,
all too clearly. We'd been steeling ourselves for his death ever since we
met him. Quiet songwriters and their husbands, on the other hand, are
supposed to live forever. There is no routine for coping with their
deaths, and no pall of inevitability to suppress our urge to question, and
so my guess is that spending a year watching one die could easily sap all
the energy and tolerance out of you. And either you pour a new, and in
some ways stronger, foundation into the space this leaves, or else you
collapse.
Musically, much of Beth's new foundation sounds a lot like her old
one. Piano, acoustic guitar, understated keyboards and subtle drumming are
the main elements of the arrangements, Beth's clear, unaffected voice
gliding over it all with a serenity she never lets obtrusive technique
interrupt. She hasn't Nanci Griffith's high Texas twang, but they share a
similar calm concentration on the words they're singing, and a fondness for
stately, unhurried melodies durable enough to serve as either whispered
moonlight lullabies or galvanizing Cher-on-a-battleship-deck power-ballads.
The melancholy "The Color of Roses" and "No One Knows But You" are just
piano and voice, and the atmospheric "Sand and Water", the gentle "Seven
Shades of Blue" and the elegiac finale, "Say Goodnight", are all similarly
hushed and elegant. Where You Hold the Key tried to blend in soul, sultry
r&b and dance urgency, though, Sand and Water sticks closer to Beth's folk
and pop roots. The jittery "All the Time in the World" sparkles with
pizzicato mandolin and sinuous country guitar licks. The ecstatic "Happy
Girl", swirling with deep bass surges, shiny organ cascades, crisply
propulsive drums and soaring guitar, is a delirious holdover from the days
of Juice Newton's "Queen of Hearts" and Fleetwood Mac's "Second Hand News".
The loose, burbling "Heads Up for the Wrecking Ball" hangs on the verge of
a square-dance romp. And though "Beyond the Blue", with its pattering hand
drums and Hindi final verse, doesn't sound much like anything on Beth
Nielsen Chapman, it's a stylistic link to such AC peers as Peter Gabriel,
Clannad and Sarah McLachlan, to me, and thus as natural a thing to find
here as any of the others. Only the smoky "Fair Enough", with its
loop-like drumming and New-Agey gut-string guitar figures, shows the
lingering effects of You Hold the Key's digression.
But while the music could be mostly understood as reversion, there's
no missing the impact of Ernest's death on the rest of the album. For one
thing, there is a lot more collaboration on this record, as if Beth has had
as much compassionate help making new music as she's had rebuilding her
life (overlapping projects, I suspect). Matt Rollings co-wrote "The Color
of Roses", and plays the piano on it. Gary Nicholson co-wrote "Beyond the
Blue". Canadian country-pop stalwart Bill Lloyd co-wrote "All the Time in
the World", and plays guitar and sings backup on it. Guitarist Dominic
Miller and pianist Kevin Savigar helped write and play "Fair Enough".
Michael McDonald sings the duet part on "Seven Shades of Blue". Annie
Shoes Roboff co-wrote "Happy Girl", and contributes bandoleon (some sort of
accordion variant, apparently) to it. Joe Henry co-wrote "Say Goodnight".
And Bonnie Raitt plays dobro and slide guitar, and sings, on "Heads Up for
the Wrecking Ball".
The extra hands notwithstanding, the album's words and sentiments are
all distinctly Beth's. The lyrical genius of Beth Nielsen Chapman, to me,
was that Beth was able to invest emotional nuance into the smallest,
subtlest observations; here the observations necessarily get a little
deeper, but are just as deftly expressed. The first couple verses of "The
Color of Roses" read like a song of found love, but when, towards the end,
she sings "And in this dream we share, / Let us not miss one kiss",
awareness inverts the chronology, and the story becomes a love song in
retrospect, the happiness and hope in the beginning of it all the more
sharp and awesome for the tragedy they know will come. "Beyond the Blue"
is suspended in paradox between the will to stay alive ("Every breath I
take...") and the eagerness to die ("...I'm closer to that place"). "All
the Time in the World" opens with a carefully rendered scene, watched
through a bank window from a traffic jam, of an unknown woman with a weary
infant just trying to get through her day, but then suddenly opens its
heart wide, and wishes eternity for everybody, awash in the realization
that time is more precious than anything you can fill it with. (I
particularly like the mild-mannered excess of the last verse: "I'll take
the curves, I'll dodge the cops, / I'll jump the ditches / Doing eighty
miles an hour / Slamming back into your arms"; sort of like the Blues
Brothers car-chase rewritten for a Ford Windstar, open countryside, no
smoking and no pursuit.) "Sand and Water" is her reconcilliation with
continuing life, and the things, like their son, in which his spirit will
live on. "Seven Shades of Blue"'s unexpected "And we made love on the
kitchen table / Till the water reached a boil" manages to add sexual
passion to the portrait of their relationship without disturbing its
domestic wholesomeness at all. "Happy Girl" is the grand release, the song
of gathering momentum that signals that the summit is finally behind her,
and I adore its concluding acquiescence, "Let the axis twirl", which I take
as giving a naturally joyous world leave to stop mourning. "No One Knows
But You", a bit of undertow after "Happy Girl", is yearning and
uncomforted. Equilibrium mostly returns for the goofy send-off "Heads Up
for the Wrecking Ball", but even here the bridge, "High on a shelf inside
myself I go. / One day we'll all fly home", is still looking somewhere
else. And "Say Goodnight", though structured musically like an epilogue,
is actually sung as his song back to her, and her version of his solution,
"Say goodnight, not goodbye", shows that she is not trying to learn to live
without him, at all, she's just trying to find a way to account for his
absence that doesn't involve letting his presence out of her life.
But if I believe, as I think I do, that there are no gods, and there
is no afterlife, then why doesn't this bother me? This album should seem
essentially misguided, and I shouldn't feel, as I do, like I'm stretched on
a rack between heart-wrenching euphoria and helpless dissolution into
tears. I shouldn't empathize with these songs. The amazing strength in
this album is not self-sufficiency, or an acceptance of meaninglessness, or
any other theory of meaning I would endorse, it is the derivation of an
ability to continue from the promise that this sadness is finite, and that
it is replaced by something afterwards. In her voice, as she sings these
songs to him, I do not hear poetic device, I hear the unassailable
certainty that he is listening to them, and that she wants him to be proud
of her for carrying on, as much with him after his death as she was before
it. But if you don't believe that they will be reunited, then the universe
has let these songs down. If there is not a plane of existence in which,
years from now, Beth will rush into Ernest's arms (or whatever equivalent
spirits substitute), then there is no justice in art. Our lives are
attempts to find stories threaded through the chaos, like hunters and bears
and queens hanging over our heads, and Beth and Ernest's story can properly
end only one way: the brightness swallows everything, and just before they
disappear she says "I missed you", and he says "You did great". If there
are no angels, and he isn't listening after all, then these songs have been
deprived of their audience, and will plunge into some silent, hopeless
abyss. But I can't let that happen. I love them too much for them to have
been merely an appealing dream.
My unwillingness to see them fall unheard, in fact, must be exactly
why these songs affect me so deeply. If Ernest is not there to hear them,
I must hear them myself, in his stead. If the one audience to whom these
songs are perfectly pure and simple doesn't exist, then I, to whom they are
complicated and ambiguous, must find something to take the place of his
understanding smile. All of us, whoever chooses to hear this album, must
pool our little epiphanies together, until we have replaced all the joy
lost. Perhaps belief and reality are indistinguishable, or perhaps just
telling a story is enough to make it true, or perhaps the secret to
overcoming any grief is not to fight against it but to absorb it, turning
its strength into your own. "Say goodnight, not goodby" describes my
relationship to most things, frankly. All progress is temporary, as are
we. So why not let loss be temporary, as well? Sadness is finite. It can
fill your life, or it can end as soon as you wish. So I half cry,
half-smiling, and try desperately to figure out the difference.

Copyright (c) 1997, glenn mcdonald

The War Against Silence is published weekly at www.furia.com/twas, and
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