A CD from the boundaries of bluegrass

I've been working on a lot of artist bios and liner notes recently. One of those pieces I wanted to post here. It's the expanded version of liner notes coming soon in the sophomore release by Alecia Nugent on Rounder Records. I didn't have to blow any hot air into my enthusiasm for this project, and repeated listening just deepens how good I think this CD is.  - CPH

If you live in Nashville and you chase good music for fun or profit, you’re going to hear more strong female voices than you’d ever dream could exist under one sun. Some days it seems like everyone can sing like a bird or an angel or some other tortured metaphor. Like pretty faces, pretty throats are commonplace. Harder to find and more to be cherished are singers who mesh with their material - artists who take you into the inner sanctum of a song and show you more spacious rooms there than you could have found on your own.

Ever larger numbers of music fans are discovering that Alecia Nugent is that kind of vocal artist. Upon the release of her debut album on Rounder Records in 2004, word spread fast that this fresh face and voice from the unlikely bluegrass cradle of rural Louisiana had the kind of power and sensitivity we associate with the legends. To festival goers in her region she was a local treasure, but to the rest of the bluegrass world, she was a rumor. Then a series of now-familiar events brought her to the wider world, not as a new teen prodigy but a fully realized artist with life experience and something to say.

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If you live in Nashville and you chase good music for fun or profit, you’re going to hear more strong female voices than you’d ever dream could exist under one sun. Some days it seems like everyone can sing like a bird or an angel or some other tortured metaphor. Like pretty faces, pretty throats are commonplace. Harder to find and more to be cherished are singers who mesh with their material - artists who take you into the inner sanctum of a song and show you more spacious rooms there than you could have found on your own.

Ever larger numbers of music fans are discovering that Alecia Nugent is that kind of vocal artist. Upon the release of her debut album on Rounder Records in 2004, word spread fast that this fresh face and voice from the unlikely bluegrass cradle of rural Louisiana had the kind of power and sensitivity we associate with the legends. To festival goers in her region she was a local treasure, but to the rest of the bluegrass world, she was a rumor. Then a series of now-familiar events brought her to the wider world, not as a new teen prodigy but a fully realized artist with life experience and something to say.

To recap, Nugent grew up in a large and musical family singing bluegrass and gospel frequently with her father’s Southland Bluegrass Band. She married young and had three daughters - a perfectly conventional path in her world, but one that complicated and deferred her dreams of a full-fledged music career. But after fate led her to a Nashville recording studio with master producer Carl Jackson and some of the world’s best sidemen, that dream blew up from pilot light to blowtorch. Jackson’s passionate discipline revealed to Nugent with a clarity she hadn’t known before that she’d found her true calling.

A Little Girl…A Big Four-Lane is in many ways about everything that’s followed from that epiphany. “It conveniently worked out that the theme of this album is basically about me leaving Louisiana and coming to Nashville and going from an amateur to a professional level and conquering the world on my own,” Nugent says. And indeed the songs so closely reflect where she is and where she’s going as a person that she might have written them herself.

Fact is, though, that this catalog of roads, forks, journeys, and arrivals was largely written by Jackson himself or his immensely talented friends and colleagues like Jerry Salley, John Pennell and Leslie Satcher. The album kicks off with a song about the carefree time between one bad situation and another, when the world seems “Too Good To Be True” and, as Alicia confesses, “probably is.” The lovely “God Knows What” depicts a woman leaving home and searching for a vague but tantalizing destiny. “When It Comes Down To Us,” a long-planned duet with the remarkable Bradley Walker, investigates the precarious last throes of a relationship with remarkable pathos. “Breaking New Ground” updates a Wild Rose country hit with a lusty expression of renewal and freedom.

If Alecia’s debut pledged allegiance to bluegrass tradition, this disc declares independence from bluegrass orthodoxy. She and Jackson called on drummer/percussionist Tony Creasman to give the tracks a little extra push. Songs like the fascinating “Still Got It” and the decidedly country “Where The Wheels Left The Road” show off a range even Nugent wasn’t sure she had. “These are the songs that reached out to me,” she says by way of a simple explanation. “This album is me.”

This is an oft repeated eye-roller in commercial country music, where radio and video are the most important venue and where artists are only really allowed to be themselves if that happens to mesh with the marketplace. Nugent has the advantage of working in the bluegrass universe where creativity mingled with excellence is generally rewarded with artistic freedom and high regard. Nugent has achieved both, but what follows should be interesting. She says she hopes to bring her truthful, emotional sound to the mainstream, and with her genre-transcending appeal, it could easily work out that way.