O.C Record Review : In Jann Browne Country, Music Speaks the Truth

**** Jann Browne

“Count Me In”

Red Moon (Swiss import)

A lot of today’s mainstream country music makes me want to talk back to my stereo. Slick, sound-alike performances, bad puns posing as songs, phony, simplistic or rose-tinted treatments of such inherently knotty subjects as romantic strife, the working life and family ties--it’s enough to make you mutter things like “So you think Hank done it that way?” and “Life’s just not like that, buddy.”

Jann Browne’s superb new album is mutter-proof. Its indelible, supremely rewarding melodies make it hard not to hum along. Its determination to explore the hurting, even tragic, side of life without flinching leads to moments when you may have to choke back an honestly earned tear. Its overall impact may take your breath away. No, music that leaves you singing along, checking a sob or catching your breath does not need a talking-to.

The only problem with “Count Me In” is that Browne’s timing is way off: Had it come along 20 years ago, an album this strong would have established her alongside the Eagles, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt and that other J. Browne as one of the stars in Southern California’s country-rock firmament. But given the sad condition of country radio today, she already is counting herself out of the mainstream market.

“Don’t wanna play the big label game. Have no desire,” she said between sets of her record-release celebration last weekend at the Rio Grande Bar and Grill in San Juan Capistrano. “If a smaller label wants to pick it up, I’d be really happy.”

A leading figure on the Orange County country scene since she moved here from her native Indiana in 1978, Browne already has had a serious fling with the Nashville mainstream--a courtship, judging from the clipped, telegraphic certitude of her comments, that she does not care to repeat.

Her albums for Curb records, “Tell Me Why” (1990) and “It Only Hurts When I Laugh” (1991), showed her command of traditional country styles and made a credible bid for radio acceptance without sacrificing her integrity. But by late 1992, her record deal was over, and she had decided to cast her lot with country’s progressive wing.

Instead of relying upon outside writers, as she did for the bulk of her first two albums, she would come up with her own material and try to follow in the path of such excellent singer-songwriters as Iris DeMent, Rosie Flores and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, whose work falls far outside the narrow stylistic and thematic boundaries of country radio.

Funding her efforts was Red Moon Records, a tiny Swiss label whose boss, Jurg Schapper, sells newspaper advertising for a living and pursues his passion for American roots-music on the side. With his help and several overseas tours, Browne has developed a promising European following.

Realistically, one could have hoped that the first album she made with complete artistic independence would show solid progress along the commendable art-before-commerce track she has chosen. What she has given us is beyond all expectations. In a field that already includes striking releases by DeMent and Johnny Cash, “Count Me In” is a legitimate contender for the year’s best country album.

A key to its excellence is Browne’s complete investment in vocal realism. She doesn’t sing with the diva-magnitude power and purity of a Reba McEntire or a Wynonna Judd. There’s a taste of tequila shots and tobacco smoke in her voice, a frayed edge that combines with a fetching sweetness to give her a wide emotional range. She sounds as if she has lived her songs, which mainly take place on the rough side of experience. She has an acute sense of phrasing that allows her to move from vulnerability to resolve within a single verse.

In “Baby Goodbye,” a bluesy lament with a touch of Billie Holiday (or k.d. lang) in it, she plays a character in the last difficult, lightheaded-from-weariness throes of declaring a love affair finally, irretrievably kaput. Just how difficult that final break can be comes across when she sings the line “we won’t drag this out, it’s all over now”--moaning and stretching “it’s all over now” to show that, like it or not, these painful endings do become tortured, dragged-out experiences. When a singer can use pure tone in this way to shade and comment upon the literal sense of a lyric, she is playing the game of vocal phrasing on its highest level.

Browne’s accompaniment on “Count Me In” is no less skilled or dynamic than when Curb was funding her sessions and bringing in such big guns as Albert Lee, Emmylou Harris and Duane Eddy. A platoon of fine guitarists contributes, notably steel ace Jay Dee Maness, electric guitarist Matthew Barnes, and Dennis Caplinger, a jack-of-all-strings who provides lustrous fiddle and acoustic guitar work and who co-produced the record with Browne.

The songwriting by Browne and her two collaborators, Barnes and Pat Gallagher, is remarkable for its strength and variety. It’s impossible to pick one or two standout tracks because the quality never lags. Marquee names like Emmylou Harris, Mary-Chapin Carpenter and Bonnie Raitt should swarm to cover this material like flies to a picnic table.

The album is paced and sequenced to create a flow of heartbreak and hope that intensifies the songs’ collective impact and turns them into a unified work. Melodic richness is everywhere, whether Browne is singing a folk-pop plaint that practically shivers with its deep sense of isolation (“Dear Loretta”), a twangy, gumption-filled declaration of strength and resilience (“Trouble’s Here,” “Long Time Gone”) or a charming ode to the pleasures and sweet sorrows of a fleeting holiday amour (“Red Moon Over Lugano”).

When she puts a rocker’s kick into her music, the results are bracing. The leadoff song, “Hearts on the Blue Train,” is an elegiac anthem that courses with a chiming, Byrds-style guitar line bolstered by muscular rhythm riffs and cushioned by a valedictory organ sigh.

In a just world, Browne’s vision of a sad sodality of souls who have been through too many empty one-night affairs would be a major hit. It could only have been written by somebody who has spent a grueling career on small-club bandstands, watching the mating dance unfold and understanding the emotional stakes involved. Browne captures the whole cycle of longing and loathing in one tight, incisive stanza:

Hearts talk when they’re lonely,

Turn to strangers late at night,

Melting long enough to harden

Before the early morning light.

Another rocker, “Count Me In,” rides a devastating, darkly plunging guitar riff that’s as dramatic and memorable as the one in Tom Petty’s “Refugee.”

“One Tired Man” takes an uncompromising look at an alcoholic drinking himself past depression and into the grave. It’s a sorrowful, urgent and unflinching song that allows for no upbeat ending and refuses the temptation to moralize. With it, Browne shows that she is up to giving us a slice of lived life, vividly dramatized, truthfully told and followed through to its toughest conclusions. You can’t ask for much more, except perhaps for a domestic record label to jump on this and put it in American stores, where great American music belongs.

* Available only from the Jann Browne Fan Club, (714) 963-5588; P.O. Box 2774, Laguna Beach, CA 92654-2774.