Until today I’d never bought 3 albums by the same artist in one day, but I just have to hear more of Laura Cantrell. This isn’t supposed to be a review- there’s really not a lot to say, here’s the title track from her latest download-only E.P. Trains and Boats and Planes she is my all-new (all new genre for me) favorite contemporary country singer. Don’t you love her voice? For me – its sound of apparent experience that hit home… although an album of mostly covers, I believe every expression from her, every twangy note and its not in an obvious weapy Christina Agulera “oh i’m so sad, so i’ll sing with a mopey voice in this verse, and now i’m happy again in this verse so i sing with a smile” which has confused most popular music (and most contemporary listeners) into believing slow means sad, twangy means uncultured, leonard cohen means suicide.

Of particular note (on the believability of performance chart) ‘Roll Truck Roll’, lyrics from her previous album, a song is written from the perspective of a Trucker’s wife- singing…. to the truck. The truck that she prays will safely bring her man back home, she sings with such an urging but not at all tiresome voice;

Roll, truck, roll
Bring my baby back to me
I’m gettin’ tired of waiting, and I’m much to lonely
Use those 18 wheels and all the speed you can muster
Roll him on home

Those are classic country lyrics to me but it feels so fresh and real from Cantrell. The next track (another re-working of her older work Cantrell’s- ‘Big Wheel’) she sings;

I feel like a big jet plane
I’ve gotta’ get in the sky,
I’ve gotta’ give it up real high,
I’ve gotta fly

Bland stuff, no? NO! Not at all, she expresses all that is dreary and southern dustbowl / one-horse-town-ish about this lyric she deeply understands. You can hear the genuine tiresome widow to the road in ‘Roll Truck Roll’ without pretense. The title track ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’ (written by Burt Bacharach) is really special in my mind and this recording does a particularly good job of capturing the spirit and thread of this ‘concept’ album. Her version has become one of my all-time favorite covered songs, its simple and raw, the mandolin is perfect.

You are from another part of the world,
You had to go back a while and then
You said you soon would return again.
I’m waiting here like I promised to.
I’m waiting here but where are you?

There’s meat too- ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ which I think would sound great in an gruff Irish drinking shanty type voice is not reduced to weepyness by Cantrell’s light Emmylou Harris-esque’ voice, the lyrics still have power and the instrumental is on a Fairport Convention level that suits me just right. So different to Fairport’s ‘Sailors Life’ but thematically and emotionally on the same level.

Maybe this E.P. is thematically in the right place for me at the moment, but I think I’m going to enjoy the rest of her albums when they arrive. Check out: Laura’s Website, Diesel Only Records

After the birth of my daughter, I found myself at home
more than I had been in years. I had previously traveled
a lot playing music. Walking the floors with an infant,
I couldn’t shake the idea that a music life was moving
faster somewhere out of my reach. My solace was time
spent with musician friends as we wrung every bit of
feeling out of songs like Bacharach’s ‘Trains And Boats
And Planes.’ To satisfy the urge to move, we decided to
record a set of songs using ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’
as a theme, and see where we could transport ourselves
from the confines of a Brooklyn studio, crossing depths of
water and hopping a few trains. By the time we returned
to mix, my now not-so-tiny baby was tearing up the
recording studio and all felt right in the world…

– Laura Cantrell (From the Digital Notes Thingy)