The lateness of this first, yet seemingly natural collaboration of sister singer-songwriters carries old, heavy freight. Both witnessed their father kill their mother, then himself, in the backwoods of Alabama. Decades later, finally realized, Not Dark Yet reveals both as artists mature enough to transmute tragedy into a broad array of poignant expression. They elide strict autobiography with a brilliant selection of covers of other singer-songwriters, save one song by Lynne. The title song, among Bob Dylan’s best late-period creations, has offhanded depth, a philosophic recognition of darkness’s inevitability in life. Here and elsewhere, their voices’ blood-matched closeness plumbs their souls and touches us. They obliquely approach their parental loss in Townes Van Zandt’s chilling “Lungs,” uttered from the strangely elevated viewpoint of a person dying of lung cancer: “Jesus was an only son and love his only concept/strangers cry in foreign tongues and dirty up the doorstep.”
Amid songs by Merle Haggard, Jason Isbell and others, a deftly layered spirituality dwells in this album, an acceptance of the larger mysteries. And yet, such fathomless beauty and tenderness carries through their lovely, life-worn voices that we feel them, not merely as orphans, but as women artists who have lived, lost and learned.
