All My CDs, pt 17: Barricades & Brickwalls

Country music? Seriously?

Seriously.

Barricades & Brickwalls - Kasey Chambers

My mother likes listening to NPR like... all the time. She turns it on in several parts of the house so she can wander from room to room, then forgets to turn them all off when leaving home. For this reason I tend not to like NPR; I associate it with irritatedly searching for the neglected radio to turn it off. However, I can’t have avoided overhearing some interesting things on my quest for a little quiet. One day when I was fourteen I found myself listening to an interview with Kasey Chambers, who was promoting her new album, Barricades & Brickwalls.

During the interview they played “Not Pretty Enough”, and I liked it. As a teenager with low self-esteem, it seemed to describe my insecurities exactly: “Am I not pretty enough? / Is my heart too broken? / Do I cry too much? / Am I too outspoken?”  Unlike a lot of “self-esteem songs” that show up on the pop charts, it doesn’t attempt to answer these nagging questions or end on a confidence-boosting platitude; it simply bemoans the sense of disappointment and failure that comes from not feeling quite good enough, not quite worthy of love. In a way, that helps. It’s like getting permission to be sad sometimes.

Kasey Chambers’s voice has a plaintive quality that makes it sound like she is literally crying while singing, and that makes her sad songs especially poignant. And this album is filled to the brim with sad songs. A few, such as “A Little Bit Lonesome” and “Still Feeling Blue”, follow a time-honored Country music tradition of sad songs that sound happy, complete with twangy guitar and lilting fiddle accompanying Chambers’s vocals. “On a Bad Day” follows a similar pattern, but the incongruence of moods is made less jarring because it describes a depressed person attempting to banish the blues - and then admitting that sometimes, on a bad day, they simply can’t be gotten rid of. I can definitely identify with that.

But for the Country-averse (which I usually am), don’t be too alarmed; a lot of her songs have fewer of those elements and sound more folk-rocky. “A Million Tears” and “Falling Into You” are two of my favorites; both are slow and mellow with atmospheric guitar accompaniment. “A Million Tears” is, as you might have guessed, a sad song, and the lyrics describe the feeling of having endured so much grief and sorrow that even a moment’s small comfort can mean the world. “Falling Into You” is similar, but is also a love song, describing a love that lessens all that sorrow.

One thing bothers me that did not when I was younger: the first song and title track, Barricades & Brickwalls, is unmistakably a stalker song. It describes a determination to own the object of one's desires even against that person's explicit wishes and efforts to fight back. That makes it a bit harder for me to listen to, especially with consent being such a big source of misunderstanding and conflict in our culture these days. I look forward to a time when such imagery is no longer considered "romantic".

In listening to this album for the past several days to review it, I’ve remembered something I had forgotten. I have suffered from clinical depression of varying degrees of severity for most of my life, which may account for the prevalence of sad music in my collection. But Kasey Chambers seems to have found a quick route to my heart through songs that tap into that depression, and in so doing has succeeded in soothing it in a way that other music has not. If I listen to her music when I am sad, I often become happy. For that I am grateful, and will try to keep that in mind for future days when the weight of emotions seems too heavy to lift.

I’ll be reviewing several more Kasey Chambers albums, and I can’t lie; I’m looking forward to listening to nothing else for the next few weeks.

Next: The Captain