Comment
on this story

Who:
Kelly Willis, opening for Merle Haggard

When:
Wednesday, April 14 at 8 p.m.

Where:
Tennessee Theatre

Ticket Info:
Tickets Unlimited Outlets or 656-4444

Kelly Willis matures with an album that looks forward and back

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

The reunion was unplanned. We all ended up at home over Christmas, staying with our parents. A serendipitous series of phone calls led to hastily arranged brunch plans, and that's how we came to be sitting around a small table at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Rochester, N.Y., four of us plus one.

We're nearly 30. We know each other the way you know how to walk or hold hands or anything else you can't remember not knowing. We hadn't been together like this in about eight years. There were a few faces missing—my sister, the youngest of the group by about six months, spending Christmas with her husband and new baby in Houston; another friend, whose holiday was divided between a girlfriend's family in New York and his own in Santa Fe—but they were represented in absentia, via anecdotes and photographs. The four of us plus one (a good-natured girlfriend who listened intently to stories of hide-and-seek and decades-old fights and birthday parties gone awry) sat there with bright December sun coming through the second-story window, passing around plates of hummus and baba ganouj, sorting out our adult lives.

Two of us will hit the three-decade mark this year, two the next. We know a little more and care a little less about things that seemed important 10 years ago. We have, collectively, been through a marriage and divorce; numerous heartbreaks; therapy and prozac; fallings out and reconciliations; years of confusion about our careers and ambitions and place in the world. We've also traveled the back roads of Ireland, found moderate success (a lawyer, an artist, a couple of writers), lived in Manhattan and Los Angeles and Olympia and Tennessee, and come back to Rochester more or less in one piece. We still like each other. We still like our families. We understand more about who we want to be, where we've been and where we're headed. We are, we agreed, looking around the table, doing all right.

I thought of that afternoon two months later when I heard Kelly Willis' new album, a disc full of sifting through the past and sizing up the future. Willis turned 30 while she was recording it. She's doing all right too.

"I think a lot of the songs I wrote on that record are kind of about figuring out who you are, where you belong, what you're supposed to be doing with your life," she says.

The album in question is What I Deserve, a double-edged title if there ever was one. It's a striking "comeback" after a six-year layoff by a Next Big Thing who never quite was. It's also one of the most acclaimed releases of the year, greeted with an enthusiasm reserved for returning prodigal daughters (the New York Times said, "Hovering between romantic fantasy and deflated realism, Ms. Willis taps a rare subtlety of feeling"; Spin called her "a pure-voiced C&W priestess"). A collection of aching melodies wrapped in Willis' bluesy twang, it's melancholy and mature, sad and funny and sexy and wise. It's the record Kelly Willis always wanted to make. But it took her a while to get there.

"In some ways, it does feel like the first real record for me," Willis says by phone from Chicago, her voice bearing only a hint of the Oklahoma drawl that tugs at the edges of her songs. "Because this is the first time that I actually was an adult making a record, where I really knew what I was doing."

She was anything but an adult the first time around. She was only 18 in 1987 when she joined her boyfriend's band, a Washington D.C. rockabilly outfit dubbed Kelly and the Fireballs. They moved to Austin, Texas, to be closer to the roots-rock action. It worked; the band broke up, but Willis landed a record deal with MCA Nashville. Label president Tony Brown, who had nurtured the careers of Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, and others, was a big booster. He let her bring her band, including her then-husband Mas Palermo on drums, to Music City. It was 1990, and country music was on the verge of a pop explosion. Willis was supposed to be part of it.

But it didn't quite work out that way. Her 1990 debut, Well Traveled Love, earned her some nice reviews but didn't find a niche in the marketplace. The next time out, for 1991's Bang Bang, Willis let the label call most of the shots, bringing in studio musicians and a slicker sound. The result was one top 40 country song—"Baby Take a Piece of My Heart"—and an escalation of Willis' discomfort with the Nashville machine. She started to fear success.

"I remember worrying about it, because I was afraid I was going to be really unhappy," she says. "Because I was unhappy at the time, and I didn't know how I was going to deal with it. I was worried because I wasn't fully satisfied with the material I was creating—some of it I was crazy about, but there were other aspects of it that were really unsettling to me. I can't even put my finger on what it was. There was just something about it that left me feeling uncomfortable. So I used to worry that if I did get really successful at it, that would define me for eternity. And how would I get out of it and figure out what was making me unhappy?

"So in a way it was a blessing, really, what happened."

What happened was that right after the release of her third album—1993's Kelly Willis—MCA unceremoniously dumped her. It was a jolt at the time, especially on top of Willis' recent divorce from Palermo; veteran rock producer Don Was had worked on the album, and Willis thought it was her strongest yet. But the move cut her loose from the expectations that came with the hype surrounding her signing.

The next year was a rough one. She played showcase gigs for other labels, but the only publicity she got had little to do with music. People magazine named her to its annual "50 Most Beautiful People" list, a designation that only made her that much more appealing to the tabloids after a National Enquirer freelancer caught her coming out of Lyle Lovett's hotel room in L.A. Lovett was in the middle of a disintegrating marriage to Julia Roberts, and Willis was cast as "the other woman."

Devastated, she retreated to Austin, where she's been for the last five years. Putting pieces back together, she made up with and then married her longtime boyfriend Bruce Robison, a singer-songwriter who released his own debut album last year. A&M Records, which had gotten interested in Willis via some demos Lovett produced, signed her to a deal. But shortly after releasing one EP—Fading Fast, available only in Texas for strange contractual reasons—the label had a personnel shake-up and Willis was once again without a contract.

Which brings us to Rykodisc, Willis' current label and the home of "alternative country" acts like Golden Smog. Willis had already dallied in the alt-country scene. She recorded a duet with Son Volt's Jay Farrar for the Red Hot and Bothered compilation, and Farrar's band played on Fading Fast. She had also met Gary Louris of the Jayhawks and written a few songs with him. When Rykodisc showed an interest, it felt right; Willis was willing to sacrifice the promotional firepower of a bigger label for the artistic leeway Rykodisc promised.

The result is What I Deserve, which combines six songs Willis wrote or co-wrote with seven carefully chosen covers—two by her husband, along with songs by such diverse writers as The Replacements' Paul Westerberg, Australian cult hero Paul Kelly, and British folk legend Nick Drake. It leads off with two of the tracks she wrote with Louris, the wise-but-foolish "Take Me Down" ("I don't believe a word you're saying/And I know the game you're playing/So it's only just for now/That I will let you take me down") and the title track, the album's emotional centerpiece. The latter begins with Willis asserting, "What I deserve is comfort for my shaken soul," but ends with her still searching: "My faith has strayed/I don't believe I'll be saved."

She thinks the song speaks especially to women of her generation—"We're all thinking, 'We're supposed to have kids right now' if we don't have them, all of that stuff starts to really work on you. And at the same time, you're also feeling much more comfortable with who you are. You're not as insecure as you are in your early 20s. I think that is a lot of what these songs are about."

It's hard not to notice, then, that all of the songs she covers on What I Deserve were written by men.

"One of the easier things to do is to take a song and feel like you can do it differently and therefore be worthwhile to go ahead and cover it," Willis says. "I've thought about that. There are a lot of women songwriters out there that I love, and I just think, 'Boy, I don't know if I could add anything to that.'"

And then there are the songs written by Robison.

"I know what his songs are about," she says with a small laugh. "I feel like I'm the other half of the story. We had a kind of tumultuous relationship for many years before we ever got married, and a lot of the songs are kind of about that. And I just really feel his songs, I really get them."

Critical response to the album has been overwhelmingly positive. Raves have come from the New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone, and others. It's been getting good airplay on "Americana" stations, and Willis says the label's releasing a single—the jaunty "Not Forgotten You"—to mainstream country outlets as well. Whether all of that will add up to the blockbuster success so many people predicted for her 10 years ago seems beside the point.

"At some point you decide that you don't want that to matter," she says. "Because everybody's going to have an opinion, and not everybody's going to like it. If you care too much about that, then I don't know how you can go on."

And if there's anything clear about Kelly Willis at the age of 30, it's that she has learned how to go on.