which gets a rave review on salon.com (subscription or day pass required):
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/review/2004/05/06/lynn/print.htmlLove your country
With Jack White's help, Loretta Lynn has released a country music album even godless rock 'n' rollers can embrace.
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By Stephanie Zacharek
May 6, 2004 | There are plenty of rock, country and pop-music fans who don't believe in God, and I count myself among them. What I want to know, then, is why does the album of the year often arrive just at the time one is feeling lowest? At a time when there's plenty to be depressed about in terms of our political landscape alone, it's even more miraculous that the album of 2004, Loretta Lynn's "Van Lear Rose" is a country album: Country music supposedly promotes conservative values, socially and morally if not politically. (For every Dixie Chicks out there, we also have to reckon with a Sara Evans or a Toby Keith, artists who live by the words "our country right or wrong.")
"Van Lear Rose" doesn't have a political point of view, and, as a work of art, it is within its rights not to have one. But it is, significantly, an album very much of its time. For one thing, Lynn, like Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton before her, is reaching out to a new audience -- a rock 'n' roll one -- that's potentially more appreciative of great country music than many of the people who call themselves country fans are. Like many of her contemporaries, Lynn hasn't had great success on country radio in the past 20 years. But "Van Lear Rose," which was produced and arranged by the White Stripes' Jack White (he also sings and plays on several of the songs, and wrote the music for one of them), is Lynn's way of reaching across the boundaries that have constricted her.
"Van Lear Rose" is a country record, pure and proper, if you believe that country music is more a state of mind than a rigid genre. But even though the arrangements use all the instruments we're accustomed to hearing on a country record (fiddle, pedal steel guitar, dobro and banjo), many of them show an angular inventiveness that's downright startling. This is music that fits squarely within the tradition of country as it's been laid out here on the ground -- the difference is that it stretches up into space, where it's free to blossom into something both familiar-sounding and bracingly new.
PS: Hope he doesn't beat the shit out of her at some Detroit nightclub!
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