What I'm Listening To #66

This promised to be one of the most amazing concept record- ings ever. Back in the day, her father, Johnny, made a list for Rosanne of the 100 essential country songs. On this CD, she chose 12 of them to perform. After her previous CD of original songs which was out of this world amazing, perhaps my expectations were too high......but with deuts with the likes of Bruce Springstein, Elvis Costello and Rufus Wainwright! How could it be so bad? It boggles the mind.

So what went wrong? In a word, "Orchestration". The arrangement of the songs often appear to be more about giving a instrumentalist a clever rift than allowing the instrument that sells the album, Rosanne's beautiful voice, to make the song work. John Leventhal really seems to have dropped the ball. Most aggregious was the dobro... Bro. Some of the arrangements are actually painful to listen to (e.g. "I'm Moving On." Oh please, don't let me stop you!) And even some things that you think just HAVE to work, like Rosanne and Bruce singing "Sea Of Heartbreak" together, leave you squinting at the "harmony" of their voices...and I LOVE them BOTH, but singing together was not a good idea.

So what does work? Surely something MUST work. Best vocal on the album "She's Got You", and by and large the arrangement lets us keep our focus there. "Girl From The North County" comes across as something that Rosanne would have written herself. It brings out her gift as a singer who can tell a story, too. But then again, almost anything written by Bob Dylan can be made better by someone else singing it. (And I do think he's a genius. He even gave me the courage to sing in front of people in high school, but I am NOT a genius, and well the rest, as they say is history! But I digress.) The duet that came closest to working was "Silver Wings" with Rufus Wainwright. Their voices seemed to almost caress one another, I only wish it had been on a better song with a better arrangement. The final cut was my favorite. She sang "Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow," written by her maternal grandfather, A. P. Carter. With the good sense that God and the amazing genealogy that is her ancestry gave her, she kept it spare, almost acoustic. Shame she didn't chose to go this route with the entire CD.