All My CDs, pt 53: My Shoes

My Shoes - Tret Fure

It was March of 2010. It was five months past my first devastating breakup and I was only just beginning to recover (I have always taken these things embarassingly hard.) I'd just been offered an exciting new job, to start in a week. I'd impulsively asked my brother and his then-fiance to dye my hair pink, and then the three of us had spent the evening drinking and having fun. After midnight, when I thought I'd finished this long day, the phone rang. It was two of my friends, and they had to drive seven hundred miles to Philadephia. Never mind why. And they had to be home within twenty-four hours, so they had to leave now.

 So we went. It was the most reckless, most daring stunt of my life. It seems almost mandatory that every youth must undergo at least one act of spontaneous and hairbrained adventure on the way to adulthood, and this was mine. I'm just glad it was pretty tame as wild twentysomething antics go. No drugs except caffeine, no broken laws, just three friends and a highly illogical road trip.

 How is this story relevant? Shortly before that trip, I'd heard Tret Fure's song Fly on my Pandora station, and instantly loved it. The album, My Shoes,  soon joined my collection and was in my CD player when the three of us got in my car that night. By bizarre coincidence, the music was in a style we all enjoyed and was thematically very appropriate to the situation. It was not the only CD we listened to on that trip, but it was the one we played the most. It was the most emblematic of our collective mood.

Tret Fure is a feminist folk rocker in the same tradition as a favorite of mine, Indigo Girls, whose albums I'll get to review in a few short weeks. Fure's career is no less long-standing and prolific with fourteen albums, but for some reason My Shoes is the only one I have. I will have to change that soon.

I don't know what it is about folk rock that lends itself so beautifully to road trips. Maybe it's just that folk rockers often write songs inspired by personal experience, and musicians often travel. In any case, this album definitely goes in my top ten travel albums, with several songs explicitly about travel and several more about the kinds of life upheavals that often involve travel. L.A., the opening track, is about both, using a visit to an old haunt as catalyst for discussions of the "wayward path" of life that surprisingly may exclude people whose importance was once assumed. Bigger Than I is even more road-centric, throwing out rapid-fire impressions of US locales as seen from a car window, describing not just a single trip but an entire lifestyle led in transit. It's cheerful, maybe even manic, full of the excitement of new experiences. The album closes with Minute By Minute, which tells the same story but is calmer and quieter, more reflective of the exhaustion that must follow from such energetic highs. "And I'm standing this side of tomorrow, shadows long from yesterday / minute by minute we live our lives / moment by moment we try."

Other songs dwell more on the metaphorical movements associated with major life changes, both welcome and traumatic. The title track, My Shoes, is about a painful choice to leave a loved one and all the losses associated, including loss of respect. How in the World shows the other side of that coin, with the finding of a new love and new life elsewhere. This and the other love songs are full of honest emotion, and ring true to my own experiences of both love and loss - even more since I first heard them five years ago.

The best song on the album is still the first one I heard, Fly.  An upbeat melody and soaring flute seems to encapsulate all the exhilarating freedom and empowerment that is expected of a self-led life, with the perspective switched to second person as if to encourage listeners to embody those feelings more fully.

The only place where I feel this music falls short is where the subject matter switches from personal experience to social commentary, as in The Hawk and the Dove, a very transparent  anti-war song. Now normally I love social commentary, and anti-war protest songs are folk rock's bread and butter. But somehow Tret Fure fails to strike the balance where the message is appropriately hard-hitting without sounding preachy. But nobody's perfect.

Listening to this album now has inspired me to look back on the past five years and all the changes they have wrought, both for me and for the two friends I shared that trip with. One got married, only to divorce only a few years later. The other had to change career goals just a few months away from completing a degree, and embarked on an ambitious new mission in life. As for me, I went on to get engaged twice,  change religions twice, move three times, run a marathon, and publish a poetry book. Some changes have been painful losses, but sometimes they lead to beautiful new discoveries. Maybe it's just by association that I see these themes so clearly in this album. But I think it's true that as songs expressing powerful life passages, these are particularly potent.

Next: Bleed Like Me