Emerging from the shadow of the Grand Ole Opry, there’s a new, more eclectic sound coming from Nashville today and with it a youthful new broom sweeping away the centuries of conservative Tennessee values. Opening with a sample of Gil Scott Herons’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and with a chorus that reminds the disenfranchised that they are not alone, Jon Worthy’s Don’t Let It Go is a product of a fresh and inclusive new Nashville…
I Am Her is a simmering Southern blues rock torch song that shoulders the enormous weight of being a woman in a world that treats women as second class citizens, shamed for their sexuality as the keepers of original sin. But there’s a difference that gives the song a jagged edge, because Shea Diamond is a black trans woman with a chequered past that would have Simon Cowell salivating down the front of his trademark half-unbuttoned shirt.
Staking a claim on PJ Harvey’s crown as Britain’s leading female art rock singer-songwriter, Nadine Shah’s third album has been described by The Guardian as “darkly classy post-punk” and by No Ripcord as “captivatingly bleak” and in this title track she confronts the people and politicians who treat a modern day humanitarian tragedy as a tiresome inconvenience.
Is there a better vocal flourish in all of popular music than when Edwin Starr cries out “Hunh! Good Gawd, y’all!” in the timeless anti-Vietnam protest song War? It’s the inflection of a maestro of the human voice. And with those few syllables, Starr injects a very believable sense of personal exasperation into a song that calls for the warmongers of the world to see sense.