'What do you call a woman...' From Billie Jean to Jolene, Esme Patterson gives voice to the women of popular songs

Well, my Daily Carlo project, whereby I blog every single day, has been going absolutely brilliantly, with blog posts every single day since the end of February, if the only days that we've had since the end of February have been March 2, March 17 and March 20.

So as long as we exclude a few rare exceptions/overwhelming majority of days, I've been totally solid.... and who the fuck am I kidding? I have failed you all, loyal readers. I am so sorry! I promised you daily posts and have utter failed to deliver. I feel terrible and take full responsibility for my failure.

And I know I've let you down terribly and have no right whatsoever to ask for your forgiveness... but please, PLEASE, PLEASE! I beg you, beloved readers, please give me ONE MORE chance! I promise I'll change! I PROMISE! I LOVE YOU! Please don't go... please... I'm quite lonely...

My point is, I know how important I am in your lives, delivering, as I do, the far-from-latest, hardly up-to-date news in obscure folk or country or Tom Waits-related areas of popular music, but in a totally inconsistent and random fashion. It's wrong to deny you this, I can see that now.

But at least I do know a key rule of blogging is be short, sharp and to the point, and also that I refuse to follow the rules. So starting with that rambling introduction, I will, eventually, via a strange ranting detour, get to my point: which is to highlight Esme Patterson's Woman to Woman album dedicated to giving voice to the female characters in popular music.

Esme Patterson.

From an angry Billie Jean, to an indifferent Jolene, to an Eleanor Rigby who is actually perfectly happy with her life alone, Patterson has written songs that allow the women written about by others, to tell their side of the story.

Sick of such women characters being reduced to one-dimensional props for others to comment on, Patterson has responded with a series of "answer" songs where they sing back.

I first came across Patterson as a result of her work co-writing and co-singing several tracks on the latest album by Texas country singer Shakey Graves, most notably on Dearly Departed. (I had the sheer pleasure of seeing Shakey live in Sydney last month when he opened for the unspeakably glorious country husband-and-wife duo Shovels and Rope.)

'You and I both know that the house is haunted...' Shakey Graves with Esme Patterson.

Among other things, the Colorado-based Patterson is known as a leading figure in the very unfortunately-named "folk'n'roll" scene. Yeah "folk'n'roll", I cringe just to see that phrase even written.

So before I even get to the songs in question... what the fuck is with the insistence on the world to impose ever more ridiculous labels onto popular music??? Among other things, I have described Patterson, Shakey and Shovels and Rope as all country acts, and deliberately, even though they are all more likely to be called "folk'n'roll", "Americana" or "alt.country", in no particular order, and why???

And why the fuck do I even want to *keep living* in a world where all the fucking decent country music acts are syphoned off into stupid and offensive labels like "alt. country" or "Americana" just to pander to the prejudices of ignorant people who hear "country" and think of rednecks in stupid hats who, when they are not called "Garth Brooks" are singing songs with titles like "Achy Breaky Heart" ... I mean FUCK!!!

It drives me insane. The stuff they call "alt. country" is just fucking country! The utterly ridiculous over-produced saccharine shit that comes out of the Nashville establishment should be called "alt.country"! It sure as hell has nothing to do with the real, living country music tradition and none of these empty, commercialised over-produced labels or stations would dream these days of ever releasing of playing anything as haunting or raw as country legend Hank Williams' "Alone And Forsaken".




'Alone and forsaken by fate and by man...' Makes Ian Curtis sound like Julie Andrews singing 'These Are a Few of My Favourite Things'.


But NO!!! No we live in a world were people need fucking Hollywood to produce a fucking biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix fucking TELL THEM it is OK to like an act as brilliant and cool as Johnny Cash!



'I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down ...' We live in a world so fucked an entire generation needs Hollywood to tell them it is OK to listen to someone as cool Johnny Cash! And people wonder why I despair!

Where do people think rock music came from??? From a melding of all these popular music genres, a melding of country, blues, folk and jazz into a new whole... the earliest forms of what is considered rock'n'roll, by the likes of Elvis Presley of Bill Haley, were called "rockabilly" -- in other words, it was considered, and in fact was, largely country music played fast!

Like all genres of popular music, country incorporates a wide variety of acts and influences, spawned all kinds of sub genres and has intermixed and melded with many other genres... It includes stuff that ranges widely from the horrific to the glorious... as all genres in popular music do.

Because more than anything, it is just one form of popular music, and the lines between one form and another are inevitably blurred. The line between country and blues is blurry, as it is with other forms of folk and what became known as rock. Because they are all variations on the same thing, the same chords and chord structures, the same verse/chorus/verse forms...

Country music, like other forms of folk (of which country is one), has a particular emphasis on story-telling, on using songs as vehicles to create characters and give them life, to use the stories to capture universal emotions and paint scenes the listener can relate to and empathise with, that can humanise the listener's own emotions and struggles... Which you might thing is an especially glorious thing to do...,

But obviously you'd be wrong, because everyone knows country is UNCOOL, country is crap, country is for inbred right-wing redneck white trash... and this despite the sheer brilliant, often groundbreaking and hugely influential quality of great country acts like Hank Williams or Patsy Cline or Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Guy Clarke, Townes Van Zandt, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Emily Lou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Alison Kraus, Gillian Welch, Neko Case, Gurf Morlix, Blaze Foley, Todd Snider, Corb Lund, Hayes Carll... and so many more.

BUT NO. Just turn your back on that! Not cool enough! Hollywood hasn't told you that you are allowed to like it! SPIT ON IT!!! REFER TO IT ONLY IRONICALLY AT BEST AND MOST OF ALL LAUGH AT IT AND MOCK!!!!

But I digress...

Answer songs. What Esme Patterson is doing is not new, by the way. Those who, based on ridiculous stereotypes and prejudices, might imagine that the most country music has had to say on the matter of gender is Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man",  would not know about Kitty Wells awesome "answer" song to a track by Hank Williams.

The song, "It Wasn't God Who Made Honkey Tonk Angels", was released in 1952, a full 16 years before "Stand By Your Man". In it Wells answers Williams' "Wild Side of Life", which was about women being led "astray" by the "wild side of life" and becoming "honky tonk angels" -- also known as "women drinking in bars".

Taking the same tune, "It Wasn't God" responded by putting the blame for men being unfaithful entirely ... on men themselves.

It's a shame that all the blame is on us women
It's not true that only you men feel the same
From the start most every heart that's ever broken
Was because there always was a man to blame

Following in this tradition, Esme Patterson takes well-known songs by a range of (mostly but not exclusively) male artists about women and writes a response by the woman in question. It is, as she explains in a Vice.com interview, a creative and intellectual exercise -- it is a challenge to write in their voices to "humanize these characters".

This means the songs are not intended as attacks on the originals, as such -- you don't have to disown Dolly Parton and her classic "Jolene", for instance, to appreciate the witty, irreverent response Patterson has written for Jolene, whose attitude to the man Parton loves is, after all, unrecorded.

It also means that Patterson is not suggesting this is the only possible response by these characters... just the ones she has written.

Asked by Vice.com how she felt about others considered the album to be a feminist work, Patterson responded:

I welcome that. It’s a noble word to be associated with. I took on this project mostly as a personal journey in songwriting, and didn’t have any big plans with where it could go. But I certainly identify as a feminist, and I’m happy to have the work that I do give strength to that cause.

The highlight is the angry, up-tempo guitar-driven response Patterson has Billie Jean gives the character Michael Jackson adopts in his famous track. In response to the singer's insistence that Billie Jean "is not my lover" just "a girl who thinks that I am the one, but the kid is not my son", Patterson has Billie Jean spitting back: "What do you call a women when she's lying in your bed?"




'What makes a lover from a woman that you've had?'


"Never Chase A Man" is a close second, with Patterson's Jolene telling Parton that her man is a sexist creep who's "always leaning in", and, bluntly: "Your man don't mean a thing to me."




'Men should be chasing you, never chase a man.' Patterson has Jolene give Dolly Parton some advice on how to treat men.


You can read Patterson's own explanation for what motivated her and what she was trying to achieve in a column she wrote for The Guardian:

It all started when I was in a hotel room in Spearfish, South Dakota, learning to play Loretta by Townes Van Zandt. I looked the words up and was copying them to my journal, and realised I was really reading the words for the first time ... 

Among other things, Van Zandt says of Loretta that she “loves me like I want her to”. Reading that line in that moment, I had a revelation. What if Loretta could tell her side of the story, what would she say? How would the story change? What does she want? 

That night, I gave up learning to play Townes’s tune and instead wrote a song from Loretta’s voice called Tumbleweed. Once I’d heard Loretta in this new way, I felt as if I was listening to a lot of the old music for the first time – and it inspired me to get to work. I wrote a song from the perspective of Dolly Parton’s Jolene, Elvis Costello’s Alison, The Kinks’ Lola, the Beach Boys’ Caroline, the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, Bob Dylan’s Ramona, Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, the Band’s Evangeline, and Leadbelly’s Irene...

I believe that our experience is the only truth we can honestly claim – and to create this album, I had to reach deeper than my own life and into the stories of these fictional women, into what makes each of these characters human ... 

The key thing I realised writing this album was that I had never really known what some of my favourite songs were about. A catchy melody or an amazing singer takes the spotlight while the story being told takes a backseat. One aim of this project was to take an in-depth look at songs about women that I had heard hundreds of times before and to finally really listen.

Woman to Woman gives a voice to female archetypes shown one-dimensionally in pop music. The record aims to transform these characters into women, to make them human.

Songs for Kevin (or: let's save money and just let Clive Palmer elect our leaders)

“I've never seen a night so long, when time goes crawling by ... The silence of a falling star, lights up a purple sky ... And I'm so lonesome I could cry.” Seasick Steve gives his rendition of the Hank Williams' classic, looking just like our fallen PM will after a decade of drinkin' to forget, with a chaser to kill the pain.


Christ, it was a sad sight that press conference. Kevin Rudd in tears after getting dumped as Dear Leader before his first term even finished after enjoying record approval ratings for almost the whole time since we threw out that other fascist Johnny Someone.

It was hard not to feel sorry for the little guy. He got brutally knifed by a political machine uglier than a local council-commissioned public sculpture on the theme of “Harmony”, and more brutal than a Mafia gang that’s just discovered a snitch who not only ratted to the Feds but also claimed the Don’s breath smelt.

Then I remembered that not only did Mr Rudd utterly fail to confront the somewhat urgent threat of runaway climate change, despite calling it the “greatest moral challenge of our time” and the mounting evidence of impending catastrophe.

No, much worse — he also declared war on booze.

The little fucking weasel.

Now I don’t like to boast, but I gotta say: Carlo Sands called it.

Hell, I called this one two years ago with an insightful, razor-sharp comment piece entitled Rudd’s honeymoon over? Let’s ask Tex Perkins.

Now, it goes without saying that Carlo Sands is never wrong. Sometimes, however, I am ahead of my time.

Some may argue that my call that Rudd’s “honeymoon” with the Australian people was over, coming more than a year-and-a-half before his record-levels of popular support began to seriously erode, was a little hasty.

I, however, prefer to call it prescient.

So what went wrong? How did Rudd go from record popularity to being the first Labor PM ever dumped by his own party before his first term even ended?

I think the history books will clearly record the seeds of Rudd’s destruction lay in the ill-fated decision in his first year in office to run a campaign declaring four standards drinks (that’s less than three stubbies!) to be “binge drinking”.

This alienated him from both the public at large and the Labor party machine. I mean, have you seen how much those factional headkickers drink? No wonder they knifed him with such glee.

But there were clearly some other, if secondary, factors at work.

Rudd basically continued the same policies as the former Howard government in all key areas. But most of all, his failures on climate change cost him big.

The serious slide in Rudd’s popularity coincided with his government’s decision to dump its proposed “emissions trading scheme”, which it had been touting as the solution to the threat of total eco-destruction.

Environmentalists actually pointed out the ETS itself was just political window dressing that not only would not reduce carbon emissions, but would actually make the problem worse.

But that is neither here nor there. The decision to dump it as soon as it became a “hard sell” revealed Rudd for the unprincipled, power-hungry weasel he is. It made him look cynical, hypocritical and totally untrustworthy.

Plus, the climate issue is kinda urgent.

But worse was to come for our wowser PM.

Desperate to make up lost ground and searching for an issue that would prove popular and make him seem like he actually stood for something more than his own career, Rudd made the ill-fated decision to seek to impose a quite modest “supertax” on the extremely wealthy large mining corporations currently enjoying record profits.

The 40% tax only kicked in once the profit rate exceed 6%, was bound up with continuing subsidies to the sector, was full of loopholes and was going to be used to cut the corporate tax rate overall from 32% to 28%.

But my god did the billionaire shriek like a three-year-old whose favourite teddy got washed down a sewer.

These principled men, who like to whine about “economic blackmail” should any of their workforce dare engage in industrial action, immediately threatened to bring the country to its knees with a coordinated “capital strike”.

They went on telly to deliver their snarling threat: Dump the mining tax or thousands of jobs get it!

They immediately embarked on a well-funded media campaign, with attack ads promising all life on Earth would come to a screeching halt if Rudd wasn’t stopped.

Seeing a chance to get the Liberals back in, the Murdoch media and shock jocks jumped on the bandwagon.

Suddenly it was 1951 all over again and the Communists were coming to eat our babies.

Rudd, weakened by his “binge drinking” and climate disasters, was in no position to withstand the assault.

Even if the multi-national corporations failed to exactly win public sympathy for their plight, they caused enough unease and fear to ensure Rudd’s poll slide worsened.

With an election just months away, the Labor machine didn’t need to be told twice. Rudd was dumped and the mining shares rose at once. Gillard’s first move was to sue for peace.

As the saying goes, it's all fun and games until someone tries to tax the mining giants.

I must admit, it does make me wonder whether all the effort of getting 20 million people to vote is just an inefficient waste of our time and hard-earned taxpayers money.

Surely it would be much cheaper and time-efficient to just get the Business Council of Australia to hold a straw poll on who should hold the keys to the Lodge. Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt could be granted a vote at the council when the question arises, just so all key stakeholders have a say.

That way, the rest of us wont lose an hour of valuable drinking time one Saturday every three years and the good businessfolk can ensure the corporate tax rate is set at the responsible, investor-friendly level of -75%.

In the end, Rudd managed to alienate both his own social base and the extremely powerful forces that actually govern this godforsaken country. The generals moved in for the kill and the coup was quick — if disappointingly bloodless.

It is a shame the our new Dear leader wants to suck up to the Evil Forces Threatened All Life on Earth (known as “miners” in the press for some inexplicable reason, despite never having fossicked for anything more than a hors d’oeuvre that fell under the table at a cocktail party to celebrate another record breaking profit return).

But, to date, she is yet to announce her policy on booze. Therefore, Carlo Sands withholds his judgment.

As for Mr Rudd, all that’s left for him is to redeem himself in true country music style. He must now take his guidance from Merle Haggard.



“I got swingin' doors, a jukebox and a bar stool. My new home has a flashin' neon sign. Stop by and see me anytime you want to, coz I'm, always here at home till closing time...”

If Kevin Rudd had any dignity or self-respect, this is how he would spend his declining years.

A dystopian nightmare that speaks to our deepest fears

"I'm just gonna go home, lie down, and listen to country music. The music of pain."

So said a wounded Xander Harris.

Country music has always tended towards the sorrowful and downright depressing. The legendary Hank Williams, (the "granddaddy of 'em all" as it might, somewhat unfortunately, be put) is, after all, in the Guinness Book of Records for releasing the single greatest number of songs with the word "lonesome" in the title.

He is also in at least the top five for releasing songs with a title including the term "blues" — not uncommonly paired with "lonesome".

Sometimes the phrase "lovesick" is even thrown in for good effect.

Take, for example, this more or less standard Hank Williams number, entitled "Long Gone Lonesome Blues"

This is a song in which things are going so badly for the protagonist that he cannot even succeed in ending his agony via suicide.

While you need to hear Hank's trademark "yodel of pain" to fully appreciate the suffering implied by the song, the lyrics themselves give a taste.

It all starts innocently enough.

"I went down to the river to watch the fish swim by"

Perfectly natural, and sounds quite pleasant. What could possibly go wrong?

"But I got to the river so lonesome I wanted to die..., oh lord!"

Oh Jesus Christ indeed! How did that happen?

Talk about suffering a depressive episode. What is he, scared of fish? Then why did he go and watch them?

He must have known that would place him in a high-risk situation, in which the chances of suffering an attack of extreme anxiety would be quite heightened.

But it gets worse for our fishophobic depressive narrator.

"And then I jumped in the river, but the doggone river was dry."

When nothing goes right, nothing goes right. Not even suicide attempts to end the pain.

And the cause of all this?

"A man needs a woman that he can lean on"

Indeed, who could disagree? Assuming by woman you mean Johnny Depp.

"But my leanin' post is done left and gone"

Ah.

"Shes long gone, and now I'm lonesome blue"

No doubt.

Not one to be disheartened by a single failed attempt, Hank insists:

"I'm gonna find me a river, one thats cold as ice."

In case you have somehow missed the significance of the search, he adds:

"I'm goin down in it three times, but lord I'm only comin' up twice."

And people say the likes of Morrissey and Leonard Cohen are depressive.

Seriously, Hank Williams makes Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain look like members of the Wiggles.

Since Hank's premature departure from the world of the living after he passed away in the backseat of a car after a difficult battle with alcohol and drug addiction (if only he gave some hint of that he was in trouble!), he has more or less provide a standardised template for the best of country music.

Pain, pain and more pain.

Mixed with a heavy lashing of heartache.

Nonetheless, no one has ever quite matched the utter despair put to three chords of Hank Williams with about the sole exception of the young and ridiculously angst-ridden Conor Oberst (best known for fronting Bright Eyes).

I give but two examples. "If Winter Ends", which contains the line "And I give myself three days to feel better, or else I swear I am driving off the fucking cliff".

Then there is this little number, entitled "It's Cool That We Can Still Be Friends". (Note, he is employing irony.)

The song does start quite innocently, as he pretends to be okay with the friendship status of the relationship he has with a former lover, only to build into a particularly extreme and disturbing expression of emotional pain.

At the height of this agonising, he sings/screams: "I'm pouring some whiskey, yeah I'm going to get so fucking drunk!"

Whatever the reason, I, of course, can not but approve.

Some fools grimace and label him absurdly self-pitying. I say Hank would be so fucking proud.

Young Conor himself notes the influence, singing in one song about a comment by his muse of sorts: "She said the best country singers die in the back of classic cars."

As to whether Oberst, already building a solid reputation as one fond of often extreme levels of alcohol abuse, intends to follow Williams through to that conclusion remains, at this point, unclear.

Now all of this is well and good, but I did actually have a point to this post. And now, somewhat belatedly, I seek to make it.

And it is simply this.

Country music is renowned for being depressing. However, at times it can be much, much more.

Sometimes, it can be down right frightening.

The song below depicts nothing less than a dystopian nightmare. One that speaks to the very heart of our deepest held fears.

It is one of the very few songs that sends a genuine chill right up my spine.

I am speaking of that truly terrifying horror-story-put-to music by ol' Merle Haggard, entitled "Tonight, The Bottle Let Me Down". (the best version, which for some reason has embedding disabled, can be found here)



"The one true friend I thought I had found ... tonight, the bottle, it let me down."

What a tale of treachery and betrayal. I tell you, if I ever find that bottle...

The song is just so, so goddamn sad.