Previous Teddy Thompson albums were respectful, well reviewed soft folk; filled with decent writing that suggested a filial connection to this parents but little ambition. He kind of didn't need it, he had not only the right family, but also friends who were the same second-generation singer songwriters who grew up and made music together. Thompson was of a similar group to Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Adam Cohen, Ben Taylor and Sean Lennon. There was noting in his presentation that would suggest he was capable of something as exquisite and heart broken as Upfront and Downlow.
That he did this while mostly recording in Silver Lake or Williamsburg, and only made it to Kansas once, combined with his growing up in London and New York, make it seem that this album shouldn't work at all. Listening to this melancholic and difficult work of cultural interpretation is made even more impressive in how he understands the grammar of artists like Earnest Tubbs, Jerry Lee Lewis and George Jones and their place in mid 60s Nashville. He cannot have a geographic or social familiarity with the signs that he is working though, but being too close to the source might mean a refusal to treat the songs as his own.
Thompson was on the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack with both Rufus Wainwright and Emily Lou Harris. Emmy Lou Harris sings on one track, and Rufus does the strings on another. Thinking of the original song Maker's Make, that Wainwright sang on that album—how he made it sound like a cowboy hymn, how he combined his sensibility to the isolation of the film, and in general the west, made for such lovely consolations, in the wake of grief and mourning. This whole album is an extension of Wainwright's instinct, in how it infuses the ache, the isolating landscape, and the erotic longing into Thompson's urban sensibility. Part of that sensibility though, is a toning down. This work is less theatrical, quieter, and often with out ornament.
That plainness comes with a drawl, which glides over the instrumentation, whether it is a pedal steel, a countrypolitian string arrangement or a barrelhouse organ. When he sings the Earnest Tubb classic "Walking The Floor Over You", he extends the vocals and the pedal steel curves to avoid charging guitars. How he sings the word walk makes a listener's stomach drop in a universal way—like finding out about a mistress, or other equally banal betrayals. To take such an iconic torch song and claim it, takes more humility then bravery, more respect to the source text then faith in ones own interpretive skill.
This conservative, or at least fidelitious , relationship to country is especially strong on the tracks My Blue Tears, She Thinks I Still Care, and the previously mentioned Walking the Floor Over You. She Still Thinks I Care was written for George Jones, about Tammy Wynette, a relationship legendary for both it's brokenness and it's ability to use that brokenness for the best documents of American desire. This song is so desperate, and so intensely personal; the history of that relationship stains the text permanently. Regardless of who is singing She Thinks I Still Care, it is always the Possum singing it to Tammy. While reviewing this album, I heard the rising chart country star Josh Turner sign it on CMT. Turner has a golden baritone, and the technical skills to pull it off—he is a better singer then almost anyone working in Nashville, but he lacked the obsessive, heart breaking refusal to let go. It's a good rendition, but Thompson's is better. A delicate set of negations between the principals in the song; between Jones and Thompson; between folk music and country, the song layers texts and meta-texts so expertly, and sings so softly, that all kinds of desperation grow into a ever present oppressiveness that burrows the core.
This understanding the presence of the song, the subtext and the history of the genre, is all over the album. My Blue Tear, written by Dolly Parton, with an ear to her native Appalachia, has a deeply sophisticated parallelism, which has to be underplayed, so that the emotions of the song are louder then the word craft. The lines, Fly away from my window little blue bird/Fly as far as you can away from here/And let not your song fall upon my ear/Go spread your blue wings and I'll shed my blue tears", sung so that all of nature obeys the mourning lover, has power because of its formalism, and that it could be an example of museum style literary analysis, and is left to be a gorgeously under stated, almost holy, unfolding of romanticism, makes explicit that Thompson knows how to control his tone, and work that into the context required.
His low small voice, the underplayed instrumentation, and his knowledge of the material, are almost conspiratorial in how they work towards the central goal of being proud and ashamed simultaneously of sentiment, of emotion itself. That the shame, the narrative power, all come through choices in how he sings, and how he plays suggests that he has learnt important lessons from his family, his peers, and his previous releases. The whole package, the history, the musicianship, the interpretative skill, make this perhaps the best country album so far this year.
