The late Sam Shepard has long been one of the key influences in my creative life. In this, I'm in the company of myriad others.
Among them his kid sister, singer/songwriter/guitarist Sandy Rogers, whose recording debut was the western/folk soundtrack for Robert Altman's 1985 feature-film adaptation (starring Shepard) of the playwright-actor's brilliant one-act, Fool for Love. While the movie's reviews were mixed, Rogers' 10 songs—which riffed on Fool's narrative, seemingly from the viewpoint of female lead “May” (an underrated Kim Basinger)—were roundly, rightly praised.
Plus—that voice! One part Janis Joplin throwback and one part Lucinda Williams forebear, Rogers' authentic western vocal stylings, complete with yodels, weren't like anything else out there.
For nine years, Sandy fans awaited her next release—a mere single, as it turned out: strangely, Fool for Love's fine yet heretofore unused would-be title song, handpicked by Quentin Tarantino for the soundtrack to his Reservoir Dogs. Not until 1997 did her second album, Green Moon, wax its way onto the horizon: we were graced with nine new insta-classics plus the reissued “Fool for Love” track.
And then came… an even longer wait. But the reward, again, was ample. For, as one reviewer wrote in 1994 of Tom Petty's Wildflowers album, so it is with Rogers' new Wonderin: without being derivative, these songs sound like they've been around for ages. They're also downright transportive—with each song taking you somewhere different.
And yes, I'll touch on them all; when just 10 treasures arrive, once every 12 to 20 years, a comprehensive, song-by-song approach is merited.
The rousing opener “Nothin You Can Do Bout That” is a rollicking ride on the Cowgirl Express that recalls, and holds its own with, both Leadbelly's “Rock Island Line” and the 1970 Melanie hit “Look What They've Done to My Song.” Next is the bluesy, sexy “My Baby Mine,” whose instrumental highlight—Randy Quan's lead guitar—evokes (in a good way) a lovesick mastodon stuck out in the hall, trumpeting at the half-open studio door. Sunny and revved-up, “Missouri Blue” takes us to that state's southwestern corner, where the clocks are all on Tulsa time. The homespun, banjo-inflected musings of “Good Dog” evoke a clapboard house in Hot Springs, Montana, whose lease I can maybe-just-maybe swing—and where, with my new bride and my old hound, I can maybe make a fresh start. Side A closes with the gorgeous, pining title track, wherein—thanks equally to Steve Liss' harmonica and Rogers' long, sustained vocal lines—one indeed “can hear the wind whi-i-i-ine.”
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Side B kicks off with my favorite track, “Rented Room”—a bopping hill-country companion-piece to “Good Dog,” this time with a fun sing-along chorus and a winking vocal that turns “I misplaced my watch an' lost all track o' time” into good news. “The Tradewinds” blow me across the Great Plains to Interior, S.D. and straight into the Horse Shoe bar for a sweet, sad slow-dance—then back home to Kadoka where, the morning after, there's “an Alka Seltzer ring around the glass.” In “Idaho,” Chandler Pratt seems to banjo-pick his way through Craters of the Moon en route to a better life down the road, perhaps in Pocatello. Rogers graciously hands over the lead vocal to onetime punker Austin de Lone and sings harmony on the poignant family chronicle “Elaine Mae,” whose title character, while “searchin for love, sure found lust.”
The album's lovely valedictory, “Sand Walkin,” is less a stroll than a trot, heading both to the “hole underneath this town” and to “the empty place within your heart.” Rogers closes with a directive to not just continue moving, even if on sometimes sinking feet, through the ever-unfolding mystery of one's own history, but also to “feel it in-between your toes”—to keep right on sand walkin.
Throughout, timeless themes of longing and loss, hardship and hope are sewn together by the artist's capable, six-strings-calloused fingers. And the folk quilt she creates is divine.
Wonderin why Rogers drops not just the g's but also the apostrophes from her present participles? Because there's no room! This is western music—stripped-down, close-to-the-bone, chock full of concisely worded home truths—not the overproduced Nashville sound that, for me, too often trades in clichés, both lyrical and musical.
Myself, I'm wonderin: Why only three albums in 30 years? And, more to the point: How do we get the next one out a whole lot sooner?
